


The First Men Through This Way

by feroxargentea



Category: due South
Genre: (and also a love story), Age of Sail, Epistolary, Historical AU, Journal Entries, M/M, O Canada, adventure story, age of exploration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-12
Updated: 2016-10-12
Packaged: 2018-08-14 10:45:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8010640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feroxargentea/pseuds/feroxargentea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two men. One wolf. No map. The year is 1826, the forests are vast and uncharted, and Fraser and Kowalski are about to get very, very lost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The First Men Through This Way

**Author's Note:**

> \- This fic started with a Seekrit Santa request from happy29: _“Fraser and Ray K are lost in the woods and have to learn to put their trust and faith in each other’s abilities to find their way home safely...”_ , although I doubt it’s quite what she had in mind.  
>  \- Contains historical attitudes towards (and terms for) various contentious issues, including First Nations/colonialism, religion, sexuality, and the killing of wild animals.  
>  \- Yes, Fraser is writing in British English (for reasons that become clear).  
>  \- He didn’t have an accurate map and neither do I, but [here is an unreliable sketch-map](http://i.imgur.com/32xfwDw.jpg) of where he thought he was going.
> 
> Many thanks to alltoseek and alcyone for valiant beta, to the dS_c6d Big Bang community for cheerleading, and to cj2017 for leading the way and helping me up every time I fall.

* * *

**The First Men Through This Way**

* * *

 

_The following entries are taken from two notebooks bound in red and green leather respectively, wrapped in waxed sailcloth and sealed in a tin box discovered in a cairn on King William Island in 2016. Further volumes appeared to have been exposed to the elements and weathered away. The pages of the remaining books were freeze-dried, separated, and scanned under multispectral light by the document restoration team at the Chicago History Museum. The private shorthand in the notebook marked “Fraser” was decoded and transcribed by an amateur cryptographer at the Department of Mathematics, University of Chicago, and the entries in the notebook marked “S.R.K.” were transcribed by a doctoral student in the Department of History at the same institution._

* * *

 

**_Fraser’s journal, 10 th July 1826, at the Hudson’s Bay Company trading post at Moose Factory, on James Bay_, _Rupert’s Land_**

Dusk is creeping on in the hesitant, almost imperceptible way of these high latitudes, and as I sit here at the fort’s northernmost window I can still make out the Company brig _William and Ann_ riding at single anchor out in the fairway, waiting for the tide before sending her boats ashore. My Montreal voyageurs are already aboard, having left by the trading post’s own wherry. The _William and Ann_ is to continue to Halifax in a few days, and may her voyage prosper, for she carries all my boxes of specimens with her, my labour and delight for years to come.

And what of my own plans? My Canadian oarsmen have taken the kindliest leave of me, wishing me well, but all of them are needed to lade and unlade the Company’s furs or to haul supplies westwards on the new overland route to the Pacific. I suspect, in truth, that having transported me safely thus far they are glad to be unburdened of further responsibility for me. Their opinion of my endeavours has been evident enough since we left Montreal, the collection of botanical specimens being to trappers and traders alike a mere frivolity, if not a species of actual insanity.

My hopes must lie now with whomever the ship may disembark, for the journey south is not one I could undertake alone. To return the way I came is impossible: with the rivers in spate, swollen with meltwater, the currents are too rapid for any canoe to make easy headway. On foot, however, I would need but one or two companions to share the load, and those I may yet find from the crew of the _William and Ann_.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois of Boston, Massachusetts (undated)._ **

Dear Stella,

Your book of letters had gotten almost full, so I’ve made a start on this one. Won’t stay clean and shiny for long, they never do. The old one’s wrapped up with my notes from York Factory. Don’t let me forget to give it to you!

Late night tonight. Had to pack my boxes and nets for a couple of days ashore, starting at dawn, and dawn comes way too ~~damn~~ darn early here this time of year. Capt. Hanwell reckons we won’t be longer than that, says the place is trapped out a long ways inland and most of the trappers moved westward years back. Not many furs left to trade. But for me it’s a whole new fauna to collect, five hundred miles farther south than the last set, and all I’ll have is a couple of days. Could stay till the next supply ship comes, but that’d be months off, and I’ve been too long from home already. I wish I’d heard from you, Stella. You missing me yet?

I have to catch some sleep. More later. Dream of me.

S.R.K.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 11 th July 1826_ **

Only three Europeans have landed from the brig. Two of these are clerks sent down from York Factory to assist the factor here, along with their native wives and children, who have already set up their lodges outside the gates and busied themselves scraping and preparing skins. The third is a sunburnt adventurer come from the Pacific via last year’s overland trek, the “Hudson’s Bay express” as the Company employees here have begun calling it, facetiously I suppose, as it takes a full summer. He is a rough, homely fellow who said barely a word and absented himself from the trading post almost immediately to sow his wild oats amongst the natives.

No one else has left the brig, and it seems my plans are at an end; I must be content with improving my collection of northern phanerogams and return home by sea for want of anyone willing to accompany me southwards. I comfort myself with the reflection that preserving specimens on a journey across such uncivilised lands would have been extremely difficult, even had it proved possible to carry the necessary press and quires of paper, and that a single tin box of seeds would likely have marked the limit of my acquisitions.

These thoughts of mine, such as they are, are being interrupted periodically by a plaintive whining from beneath my window. The fleabitten young wolf-dog that followed me from the mouth of the Moose River is waiting here yet, hopeful of further handouts, though the employees and natives alike throw stones to drive him off. My voyageurs called him feral, but he must once have been tame, for he is clearly no more than half lupine; and in this world of half-breeds and outcasts my heart goes out to him. One of the youths from the encampment beyond the gates told me in broken French that the animal was deaf and therefore useless as hunter or sledge dog, and certainly he does not flinch at the thud of axe into chopping block, which hardly bodes well for his survival in such an unforgiving place as this.

My porridge has grown cold and unappetising; I shall take the rest of it down for him. God forgive me my sentimentality, but I cannot watch him starve.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 12 th July 1826_ **

My sunburnt adventurer from the Company brig has reappeared and it seems I did him an injustice. He was gone, not to the native encampment as I supposed, but into the low scrub and marshlands hereabouts to examine the flora and fauna, which he pronounces considerably more advanced in season than that around York Factory, whence he lately came. His name, the factor tells me, is Mr. Kowalski, and he appears to be a man of some education in spite of the roughness of his speech, and, if not particularly disposed to be sociable, has at least agreed to my accompanying him on his botanising excursions this afternoon.

I hope – I very much hope – that he might be prevailed upon to join me on my journey south, for he represents my one remaining chance, whatever his personal shortcomings. I have made what enquiries I could amongst those with whom he sailed on the _William and Ann_ , and he was commended to me as a man mostly reliable and invariably sober, a state sufficiently improbable in this locale as to persuade me I was being practised upon.

He seems steady enough, however, and I have little choice in the matter. The difficulty might rather lie in persuading him to agree to my plan, for he has travelled upwards of a thousand miles overland already and might reasonably prefer the comfort of a well-appointed ship.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

Stella, I have to run, got company. Another naturalist hanging round the place. First I’ve seen in half a continent! Speak to you as soon as I can.

S.R.K.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 13 th July 1826_ **

The matter has been fixed, and by Mr. Kowalski rather than I.

Yesterday evening I had been circumlocuting for some time, sitting by the campfire we had lighted by the shoreline, batting away mosquitoes and prosing on about my unwillingness to call an end to my travels and about the difficulties of finding guides or hunters to go with me. He was looking out across the mudflats all this time, his eyes narrowed against the glare of the sunset, waiting, I suppose, for me to gather sufficient boldness to request his company, which somehow I could not. Had he been a man of my own status, independently wealthy and inclined to travel for its own sake, or had he been a mere voyageur, a hired labourer, I might have made such a suggestion without risk of causing offence. His state being more ambiguous, however, I hesitated to open the subject, for the stillness of his posture, with his arms folded round himself in brittle defiance, made me think him a fellow both easily hurt and liable to take quick umbrage.

Eventually I ran out of words and sat on in silence as he did, watching the geese straggle against the darkening sky. When they were mere shadows on the waters, he stood up and stamped the fire into ashes.

“So take me,” he said, in a manner that was neither suggestion nor request, but more a challenge, as from one who was accustomed to refusal and fully expected it now.

I forced myself to hesitate, to avoid any unseemly display of eagerness. “Very well,” I said at last, trying to match his tone, but my heart was of course giddy with relief, and I was glad that the gathering night hid my countenance.

We have agreed after some discussion to join paths as far as the border with the States. He is originally from Boston and will shape his course there whilst I return to Nova Scotia. It is curious that we should have grown up so close to each other, only a few hundred miles apart, and met so far from home. It will be a journey of perhaps eight weeks to the St. Lawrence river and in that time I may come to regret my decision, but for now I think it a good one.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

Dear Stella,

Hope you got my last book of letters. It’s with my collections on the _William and Ann,_ bound for Halifax, to be forwarded to you in Boston by the packet. Hope you got the bundle before that, too, all the ones I wrote you up till Fort Vancouver. The _Siren_ ’s captain promised he’d bring them himself as soon as he got back from the Nootka run, so if you haven’t gotten them yet I guess either the _Siren_ is sunk or she’s taking forever beating round Cape Horn and you’ll get them any day now.

Guess you’ve figured out I’m not taking sea-passage back myself. Like I said, the ship was making this quick run down Hudson’s Bay to a couple of smaller trading posts before heading home, so I tagged along, thought maybe I’d jump off at one of the Company forts, look around a while, collect as much as I could, and jump back aboard, but now I’ve met up with this man who’s traveling home overland, so ---

See, it’s _overland_. It isn’t new territory, but it hasn’t been explored right, not by anyone that knows one bug from another. We’ll be the first scientific men to pass that way, and I’ll collect so many new species that you’ll be able to furnish a whole house with the money. So don’t yell at me, Stella. I’ll be home by fall, I promise.

S.R.K.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 14 th July 1826_ **

Mr. Kowalski has reappeared dressed in rather more respectable attire, cut to the local pattern from the cloth brought by the _William and Ann_. I ought to have recognised that his former appearance was as much the product of his long journey from the Pacific coast as of any slovenly habits of person. Indeed, his doggedness and fortitude in completing such a trek is better recommendation than any formal letter of introduction could have been.

Much to my surprise, however, he does carry such letters, including a note from Mr. John McLoughlin, Chief Factor at Fort Vancouver, whom he met in the spring of the year just gone by and who was obliging enough to assist him in acquiring specimens of several western conifers yet unknown to natural philosophy. When I asked him why he had not shown me this letter immediately, he replied somewhat mulishly to the effect that he did not care to be judged by another man’s word, even if he did acknowledge Mr. McLoughlin’s word to be worth more than most.

The brig has now completed her lading, all the bundles of furs having been hauled aboard, and she sails before dawn. We – Mr. Kowalski and I, that is, and the wolf, if wolf there still is – intend to set out a few hours later, when the fort’s wherry can carry us to the far shore of the Harricana and we can cross the mudflats at low tide. Mud and mosquitoes are not perhaps the most auspicious companions to the start of a journey, but may good luck attend us nonetheless.

“So unhook the west port and let us gae free...”

I wonder, incidentally, whether Mr. Kowalski can sing at all.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

Dear Stella,

So, southbound! Homeward bound! I guess I won’t even get to send this new batch of letters. I can just hand the whole notebook to you in person once I get to Boston.

Just the one man with me now. His name’s Mr. Fraser – I think I told you that in the note I sent you by the _William and Ann_. A Scotsman originally, as you probably guessed, and he still sounds more or less like one. They told me at the fort he was some kind of physician, so I called him “doctor” at first, but he says no, Dr. Fraser was his father, and he’s just plain mister. He came up from Montreal this spring by the old voyageur route along the Great Lakes and then down the Moose River, and he’s planning to go back along the Harricana, as far as that’ll take us. We’ll part company once we hit the St. Lawrence, him to Halifax and me back home.

Eight weeks at the outside, it’ll take us, he reckons, and the farther south we get, the more advanced the seasons will be. None of this snow and ice down there. We’ll be self-reliant, no guides to desert us, and we won’t need a French interpreter either, as he can speak the lingo. It’s below the tree-line the whole way, so that’ll give us food and shelter, and we’ll take enough powder and shot to live off the land like kings. No chance of being reduced to lichen and boot leather, as I nearly was in the Barren Lands.

Eight weeks. I can do that, whatever he’s like.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 15 th July 1826_ **

We have made a satisfactory start, some twenty miles by my estimate, and camped at dusk a little above the river’s high-flood mark. This close to the trading post there is a clearly blazed trail to follow, but the distances we can expect to cover will be markedly less once it becomes necessary to cut our way through trackless wilds.

I have used up the last of the daylight in updating my species notebook with my recent finds. Having no wax-tapers, I write this now by the flickering firelight, my page tipped perilously close to the flames. Mr. Kowalski meanwhile is occupying himself in writing a letter to his fiancée, although there is no way of forwarding his correspondence. I had feared I might hear more about her on this journey than I could wish, my experience with the Canadian voyageurs having taught me that those who happen to have sweethearts are inclined to boast of them, but in fact he appears wary of speaking of her at any length. I have gathered only that their acquaintance is of long standing but their contract relatively brief, since shortly before he left Boston in the summer of ’24; that his father was keen to promote the match, the lady’s family being comparatively wealthy; but that her own father withheld his consent until Mr. Kowalski should be in a condition to support a wife and family, which the sale of the valuable species he has acquired from the west coast may enable him to do.

All of this was imparted to me with reluctance. He seems a proud man, as those of his standing are apt to be, and still somewhat suspicious of me, inclined to suppose me ready to mock, so that I do not like to question him too directly in spite of my curiosity. He must be uncomfortably aware of his inferiority in having mercenary rather than scientific motives to his endeavours. In truth I envy him considerably: for his enterprising spirit, for journeying with a purpose and with an end in sight; perhaps even for the certainty that there will be someone waiting for him on the quayside.

And I? Well, though there may be no human soul who cares for my return, I do now have a wolf, one who is watching the movements of my pencil with growing impatience and who would remind me, with a gentle nudge of his muzzle, that he has walked a long way today, and that the mess of beans and Indian corn simmering over our campfire is at last ready to share out.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

Still walking, making good headway. Everything in order. You don’t need the details, right? Compass headings, mileage, whatever? I know you won’t want to hear about the plants and bugs either. Don’t worry, I’ll keep all that for my species journal and not trouble you with coleopteran anatomy. Your loss, Stella…

So, want to hear about Mr. Fraser instead? He’s sort of – hmm, I can’t think of a polite word. Sort of crazy. Knows his way around a map, though. Good shot, too. Quiet as ~~hell~~ heck at first, till he saw me pick up a beetle and call it by its name – its Latin name, I mean. So now I’m the man who knows the names of beetles, and that makes me his new best friend. Suddenly he can’t stop talking, like he’s been holding back for months and the ice just broke. I guess he didn’t have too many friends around here.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 16 th July 1826_ **

Several new species today. None in seed, but I have laid the specimens in paper. Two of the Carex are certainly new, the third I think a duplicate of #29 from my Moose Factory list, though taller. My botanical notebook lies buried at the base of my pack; I must remember to update it tomorrow.

I shot three geese today, the common _Branta canadensis_. We have cooked some of the meat fresh for supper, some to take with us, and some to give to the wolf. Kowalski seems content to let me carry the gun whilst he carries the axe and spare ammunition; we have but the one fowling piece, to save on weight, but a sufficiency of powder and shot, and there is no shortage of wildfowl to aim at, even if these lands south and east of Hudson’s Bay have long since been left barren of larger game.

He seems content, too, to let me perform the trickier parts of pitching camp, and I am painfully aware of being judged for the meagreness of my experience. I strive, under his eyes, not just to kindle the fire with the first strike of flint on steel, but to set up the pot-stand as handily as if I have been binding fresh-cut staves with withies all my life. He must surely be aware that all such tasks were previously done for me by the voyageurs; I was never required, nor indeed permitted, to lift a hand, except where I chose to help with the portages between the waterways, and even then I carried a load half that of the hardy Canadians, inured as they were to such burdens.

The wolf remains in company. Kowalski wanted to know what it was called, so I explained that I had assumed it already possessed a name in its own tongue. “Sure,” he said, “but people give dogs names in English too. It’s a thing that people do.” He has taken to calling the creature simply “Wolf”, to which in fairness it does appear to respond, or perhaps it is just that it has learned Kowalski is soft-hearted enough to share his food, if sufficiently pestered.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

I don’t know about this, Stella. I don’t think I’m whatever Fraser thinks I am. I think he picked me up as some kind of backwoods expert and sooner or later he’s going to figure out that I’m just watching him and trying to get it right. Like when we were making camp tonight and I was just about to lash a spruce sapling for the ridgepole between two trees, he pointed out another pair a few yards away – not telling me what to do, only a suggestion – and I realized I’d been about to set it up downwind of the fire, with the smoke streaming right into our eyes. I saw the Company’s guides and porters pitch camp a hundred times on the way over the Rocky Mountains, and I never once paid attention. Never thought about it, never thought wind direction mattered. Not on land, anyway.

Maybe Fraser worked this stuff out for himself, maybe he was born knowing. Maybe he thinks everyone was born knowing. But me, I wasn’t. I just wasn’t.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 17 th July 1826_ **

Another fifteen miles or so completed, a point or two east of south. We are making reasonable progress in spite of the boggy ground, although the necessity of staying close to the river’s meanderings so as not to lose our way adds a good deal to the journey and to the difficulties of judging distances and headings.

We are encamped tonight by an irregularity in the riverbank where the current is swirling in eddies gentle enough for us to have set our net for the first time. Kowalski has only now stopped shivering after an hour sitting by the fire; he insisted on being the one to wade in and buoy the net up with softwood and weight it with rounded stones at the base (he is a little afraid of the water, I think, and strongly unwilling for me to notice that), and in the five minutes it took him, his bare legs went cherry-pink with cold.

Summer is slow to take hold this far north and our net might yet be damaged by current-flung ice, but, as Kowalski pointed out, there is an abundance of Salix bark in the vicinity with which we can mend it. The Chief Factor assured me that trout and white-fish could be had in this manner, and also pike and carp, should we be near suitable lakes, and they would be a welcome addition to our diet.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

Still walking. Still just about keeping up with Fraser. Still not sure if he’s making allowances for me. He’s a fine physical specimen, fine enough that he could’ve been hired as an advertisement for your father’s manufactory. “Strong as an ox with DuBois Beef Tea!”

He’s a learned fellow, too. Speaks half a dozen languages. He quoted Linnaeus and Cuvier in the original to me one time, but not once he saw I couldn’t follow. He’s one of those gentleman naturalists, I guess, but not the armchair sort – he doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty. Herbaceous plants, mostly, that’s his thing. Not for trade, just for his private collection. He says he envies me my journey from the west country, says he wishes he’d gotten a look at my Pacific coast seeds. But I sent most of them straight to Veitch’s nursery from Fort Vancouver along with my boxed specimens, and all the duplicates I took overland in case of accident are on the _William and Ann_ with my Hudson’s Bay species, so there’s nothing left to show him. I’ve been trying to sketch a few of the conifers from memory, but he knows more about them than I do, even the ones he’s never seen, and I can’t answer all his questions. Can’t remember every detail of their morphology.

Maybe he can come down to Boston sometime instead? I think you’d like him. Maybe you would, anyway. Maybe you’d just think he was crazy.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 18 th July 1826_ **

Thinking to please Kowalski, I started up last night with _“Now the Chesapeake so bold, sailed from Boston we’ve been told”_ , forgetting that it ended with the Yankee frigate’s ignominious defeat at the hands of the British. I tailed off, mortified, but he struck in and finished the song with me, and I have caught him humming it once or twice since. He has a voice neither powerful nor accurate, uncertain of key, but somehow pleasant nonetheless. I wondered aloud how he had picked up the words of an English ballad, and he said, “Oh, there are men of every nation in Boston harbour, including British naval deserters looking for a life where, if a man happens to have an opinion, he can speak it aloud without fear of being lashed at the grating,” – a counterthrust I could not but admit was fair.

Then he piped up with a patriotic song about “Old Ironsides”, a little contrived as to metre and fitted to a much older tune, but sung with a fine fervour. The battle it commemorated was a famous victory of his nation over mine, he informed me, and if I knew anything at all about naval history I would have known as much (this he said with apparent amusement at the magnitude of my ignorance). He ended with a ditty of such inventive filth that it made me laugh in spite of all resolutions to the contrary, and I went to sleep at last feeling a good deal warmer.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

Thinking of you, cozy and safe in your father’s house. It’s raining here, pattering on the tarp. I’ve fixed the ridgepole to a couple of the scrubby, stunted spruce that are the only trees round here and stacked brushwood against it, thatched with sphagnum moss to keep the wind out. It’s the height of summer but it still gets cold at night. Our packs are stashed at the low end of the wedge, in a fold of tarpaulin, good and dry, and there’s just headroom enough here at the open end for me to sit and write this.

Good haul of bugs today: two Coccinellidae I found when we stopped for dinner, three Carabidae grabbed along the way, one staphylinid hiding under my blanket. Endless new species, if I had the time to collect them. Oh, and a boat or a string of packhorses to carry them back with.

Fraser picked up a couple more Ericaceae, plus an Eriophorum in full seed that he was real happy about. He’s already lain down, bundled in his blanket, humming to himself. I’ve figured out that if I sing badly for long enough, he joins in, and then I can quit and just listen. You can keep your classical concerts, Stella, your Corelli and Mozart. I have a choir of one all to myself, under the stars.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 20 th July 1826_ **

Clear sky tonight, although the ground remains damp. I have laid my plants out by the fire to dry, protected from sparks by pieces of bark. Kowalski is sitting on a folded tarpaulin, scowling and poking at the blankets as they hang above the flames, steaming gently. I hope they and our spare shirts may be dry enough to sleep in before long, for we are both ready to drop with tiredness after a long day struggling though fly-ridden sedge marshes.

Kowalski, or should it be “Kovalsky”, perhaps? I did enquire with the clerk at Moose Factory before we left, who screwed up his face for the longest time and then said, “Why, ’tis spelt with a K, to be sure.” Foolishly I hesitated to ask my companion early on (being glad enough that he acquiesced to the use of surnames alone after so little acquaintance), and now so many days have passed that I can hardly raise the question without rudeness.

(There is also the fact that he is no longer shy to make game of me. If I asked him, he might well screw up his own face for the longest time and then say, “Why, ’tis spelt with a K, to be sure.”)

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

Thunder and lightning and clouds of doom half the afternoon. We picked the right time to pitch camp. Rain’s falling in torrents now, but we don’t care, we’ve got a fire going and our feet propped up on our packs, and Fraser is whistling songs of mist and heather and rebellion. Thing with him is, he can talk forever but he doesn’t always answer the question. So tonight I complimented him on singing his Highland songs like a true Scot, thinking it might provoke him into telling me about his background, and it worked. Ha, I got him figured out.

“Well, I am a Scot,” he said. He was born in Dundee – big, prosperous town, he says – where his father had set up as a physician, but they left for Nova Scotia when he was young. He went back to Scotland for a while to study medicine, but he came home afterward. His mother had died of the cholera soon after they’d emigrated, and his father never really settled after that, giving up his medical practice in favor of longer and longer trips into the wilderness, the last of which he didn’t return from.

I asked Fraser if that’s where his own wanderlust came from, thinking he’d evade the question or maybe just launch into some folktale, the sort he spins when he doesn’t want to tell me things. But he said that in the long winter evenings of his childhood his grandmother used to read to him from the travels of Linnaeus and von Humboldt and Joseph Banks, and that his father had taken him to Montreal to see the botanist Francis Masson, who’d set him on his knee and told him of his own Scottish childhood, of how he’d fled as often as he could to the hills, where the song of the skylark was unbroken by the noise of man, and how his years of apprenticeship in London had given him a need for wilderness beyond the ken of mankind, where the only sound was the soughing of the wind in the pines. Fraser told me that as he’d grown up he too had felt trapped within the walls of Halifax, where the songbirds were drowned out by the shrieking of the gulls, and he’d known he had to escape. He had to heed that call.

Wordy, huh? That’s how he talks. All the time.

Sorry, Stella, you’re probably not interested. It’s just that there’s nothing else here to write about except the beetles, and you’ve told me often enough how you feel about them and all the other stunted, crook-legged things that crawl about on the face of God’s earth, as you put it. One day I’ll persuade you to love them, I swear I will.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 22 nd July 1826_ **

We are still being tormented by mosquitoes at dawn and dusk and by black-flies throughout the day. Broad-brimmed hats keep the black-flies from swarming into our hair and biting our scalps, but there is little to be done about the mosquitoes. Kowalski suggested smearing ourselves with turtle oil, citing von Humboldt as his authority, and I had to remind him that it was turtle _egg_ oil of which Humboldt spoke in his Narrative, and that in any case it had not been found efficacious. Besides which, we have not happened upon any turtles, though he remains nervous of crossing muddy water lest some fictitious creature snap his foot off.

(I have of course tried to reassure him that no snapping turtles are to be found this far north, but he points out that the wilderness is full of species unknown to science, and this is so evidently true that I have no reply to give.)

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

Walking, walking, and my boots are soaked through. I’ve stuck them onto the long ends of the cooking tripod to dry. They’re new ones, cost me a small fortune at York Factory. All the supplies do, that have to be carried in or shipped in. Maybe these’ll get me home, maybe they won’t. Not sure what I’ll do if they don’t last out. Sew moccasins from deerskin like the natives, I guess.

No fresh meat today, just boiled pemmican and hominy. I don’t care if I never eat that again, even mixed with all the berries we can find.

I’m short-tempered, sorry. It’s been a long day, and my beard is growing in and itches like the blazes. Why’s it always the little things that irritate the most? I had to leave my razor at Moose Factory to save weight. One less razor means one more pack of butterfly pins, a few more pill-boxes to keep my insects safe. Itches, though.

Speaking of irritants, I asked Fraser why he bothers pulling the cook-stand apart and kicking away the ashes every morning. He said, “Well, the Indians do so.” I told him, guess what, Fraser, we’re not Indians, and walked away before he could start on his brotherhood-of-man lecture again, the superiority of their birch-bark canoes or whatever.

He’s right about the canoes, though. The current’s still too fast here to paddle against, and there aren’t any trees big enough to make wooden or bark boats anyway, but once we cross the watershed we’d make better time if we could get hold of one. Only a week since the trading post, and already it seems like I’ve never done anything but march.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 25 th July 1826_ **

We are staying tonight not far from an Indian encampment – we can see the smoke from their fires – and Kowalski asked me quite directly whether I should wish for time alone to visit with the women; if so, he would make himself scarce. I could feel myself blushing furiously as I demurred. I tried stumblingly to ascertain whether he might wish for the same, but he said in some amusement, “Oh no, he would sleep where he was.”

The Canadian voyageurs always assured me (though perhaps only because they wished it so) that the natives commonly practise temporary exchange of their wives and put little value on chastity, and that the offer of their womenfolk’s company is still standard hospitality given to strangers, particularly where barter might be expected; yet even if this is true I am thankful in retrospect that Kowalski took no offence at my assumption of his willingness to break his word to his betrothed.

I, of course, have no one to whom I might be unfaithful, but the matter dismays me nonetheless. We are unlikely to pass many such encampments, the country hereabouts having been so greatly depopulated by smallpox, consumption and the like, but should we do so I am resolved not to speak of this again.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 26 th July 1826_ **

We approached the Indian camp this morning and found three men there, with half a dozen women and assorted children, several of whom were visibly part-European, descendants I suppose of the erstwhile fur trappers. They were nervous of our presence, the women and children remaining hidden in a stand of tamarack until I laid down our gun and offered some beads in token of peaceful intention, and they were reluctant to speak French, though they evidently understood it. When I made shift to communicate with them in their own language, however, they were set more at ease, if only by the absurdity of my pronunciation. 

I asked after my father and they turned to the eldest of their womenfolk, a white-haired crone, her eyes milky with cataracts, who shook her head, clutching at her beads as if I might demand them back in retaliation for an unsatisfactory answer. It has become a mere matter of form to inquire after him, of course; I have long ceased to expect any information.

Kowalski and I have traded a few of our goods for some dried provender (fish and berries and a little flour, the latter a great luxury), though we have but little to give: only needles, awls, wire, fire-steels and the like. We can afford to carry with us only the lightest wares, not the guns and hatchets and spirituous liquors that would be more greatly valued.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 27 th July 1826_ **

We continue upstream, but I am half inclined to turn back whilst the path is still clear. To traverse such wild country is risky even with compass and sextant to hand; to continue with neither is deeply unwise, and Kowalski must know this as well as I. Yet in the face of his distress I cannot bring myself to insist on returning; it would seem like an accusation. What happened earlier today was not, after all, entirely his fault.

I had left the map spread out, weighed down only by my pocket-compass, as I waited, sextant readied, for the noon observation to fix our position. Kowalski was some way upstream, having wriggled out over the water along the bole of a fallen jack pine in pursuit of some dragonfly or other: I do not know exactly what, but one of those creatures liable, in the beauty of its iridescence, to make him disregardful of all dangers. I did not even hear him fall; it was only when the wolf jumped up, howling, that I saw Kowalski’s arms flail above the boiling foam of the cataracts and then disappear as he sank under and was dashed from rapid to rapid.

I had but a moment or two before he was swept past me, and my sole reaction was bewilderment: he was not even trying to swim! Why the devil was he not trying to swim? My limbs functioned where my mind could not, however, and I managed to scramble into the eddy, throw myself to my knees and grab him by the collar just as the deeper current flung him by. Momentum swung his legs into the shallower water, but even then I do not think I could have pulled him ashore, nor perhaps have prevented myself from being sucked into the rapids with him, save that the wolf ran out and hauled at my shirttails until all three of us could stagger to safety.

Kowalski is sadly bruised but not seriously injured, God be praised, save in the battering of his pride. I hope I may not have spoken too sharply to him, and indeed I am not truly angry. Anger would after all be pointless in such a situation, and he is behaving as defensively and snappishly, poor fellow, as men wracked with guilt are prone to do. For my own part I can but be thankful he was upstream of me when he fell, for he must surely have been dragged under or knocked unconscious, had he remained in the water another minute.

Naturally the map was long gone, taken by the breeze by the time I thought to check for it, and my pocket-compass is missing too, kicked or thrown aside I suppose in my haste. Not a sign of either is to be found, though we have searched the shallows and the vegetation downstream for some hours. The sextant we have recovered, upended into the river, its mirrors smashed and its metalwork bent beyond repair.

The wolf, having disappeared until nightfall, has returned only with my hat, for which he clearly expects the utmost praise. I must admit I am grateful to have it back, for I felt strangely naked without it.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

Hurts like the deuce all over. Hurts to walk, hurts to lie here in the shelter, hurts to breathe.

Fraser keeps watching me like he expects me to do something else stupid. I guess he’s still angry I didn’t tell him I couldn’t swim. Who knew it mattered? So I’m no prodigy. I didn’t tell him I can’t fly either. Can’t dance the tarantella. All sorts of things I didn’t tell him, because he didn’t ask.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 30 th July 1826_ **

I have been keeping a sharp eye on Kowalski, but he shows no signs of adverse effects from immersion in the cold water: no feverish flush, no rigors, no weakness. He has been favouring one arm a little and has finally permitted me to examine it, but although it is purple with contusions there is no obvious fracture and the joints move freely.

This morning I awoke from another nightmare in which I found myself drowning, the waters closing over my head. It is illogical enough, for I could swim before I could walk, having been dandled by my grandmother in the highland burns lest I become soft; yet the rivers here are so vast and wild and cold that even the strongest swimmer might fear them.

Kowalski, though I watch him closely, continues to treat the water in the same studiously offhand manner as before. It is impossible that we should avoid crossing the various loops and tributaries, there being so many in our way. I can but search for the least treacherous fords, rope us securely together, and make light of the matter, and he will feel obliged to follow in the same spirit. There is something to be said for bravado.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

Found a new longicorn today. I know you don’t care, but I need to tell someone, and Fraser’s still acting strange around me. I’m almost sure it’s a new species, maybe even a new genus. Wish I had Tierney’s Compendium with me to check, but I’m sure no one’s described anything close. Its antennae are at least one and one-quarter inches, without a matching increase in body length. It’s a new genus, I’m sure it is.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 3 rd August 1826_ **

A week now since Kowalski’s fall into the water, and his bruises (bodily or otherwise) seem largely healed. He is sitting across the fire from me, perched tailor-fashion on his folded tarpaulin, as he often is, and writing in his journal of natural philosophy, or what he terms his “beetle book”. I might have supposed he did not like to write to his inamorata in my company, did I not know full well that when he has a new insect he thinks of nothing else. My first assumption that he was a mere tradesman collecting specimens for commercial purposes was quite mistaken: coleopterology is his passion, not his trade, though monetary considerations force him to sell his acquisitions to whoever will bid. He has made a sketch of this particular creature’s morphology to fill a whole page, and he is now pencilling tiny notes around its antennae.

The drawings he has shown me of his west coast conifers are similarly skilful; so too are the handful of sketches I have persuaded him to make of my own herbaceous specimens, their sexual organs and parts of fructification – so vital for classification and so difficult to preserve intact – delineated with care and precision. For one almost entirely self-taught, he is as remarkable a creature as any he depicts in his notebook.

As to his formal education, that seems to have been patchy at best. His father, he tells me, was a mate in the ropewalks at Boston harbour who wanted better for his two surviving sons and sent them early to learn their letters, with a view to finding them positions as captain’s clerks or preferably as amanuenses to one of the town’s great men or natural philosophers; and Kowalski was indeed taken along on various naturalising excursions as a lad, but he was by his own account no phoenix at his books and never learned much Latin beyond what was needed to puzzle out scientific names and descriptions: large, small, black, white, spotted, et cetera. He is dismissive of the ropewalks, however, if not of shipyards in general. “Steam is the future,” he tells me. “Ain’t going to be much call for rope or canvas any more.”

He is no great storyteller; his tale comes out hesitantly and in fragments. Frequently he stops to illustrate a point better with a sketch or diagram, pencilled into the margin of his species notebook or scratched on a boulder or drawn in the bare earth; and then he is fluent, each line bold and clear, with no false strokes.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

Had the fright of my life a couple of days back. We were just marching along, like we do – march march march – and had to wade across this little muddy creek, one of a thousand we’ve had to ford so we can keep following the main river. Fraser went first, like he does, and he was about midway across, thigh-deep in the black water, when he started yelling and struggling with something, something big that yanked him off his feet. I couldn’t see what it was, but it was _big_ , maybe ten foot long, and he went under, and that was it. Nothing left but bubbles and churning water.

I’d already flung my pack down and waded in, and I was halfway across the creek when something jumped up and grabbed me round the waist, and my God, Stella, I nearly had an apoplexy. I probably would’ve done, too, except that the crocodile floated to the surface right then, and it was all slimy and had bits of branches sticking out from it, and yeah, it was just a dead log. Real obviously just a dead log.

Fraser’s such an idiot. He was so pleased with himself, too, like he always is if he can make me laugh. For a moment I could’ve killed him, though. If I’d remembered to grab my ax instead of wading in barehanded, I might’ve done, too. Idiot.

Now he says I can claim in my “forthcoming travel book” that I’ve seen him fighting a crocodile, just like Humboldt did (or maybe it was Bonpland). He says he can help me write it, and I can illustrate it with woodcuts or engravings, that it’ll be a guaranteed bestseller. Whenever he’s seen me with a pencil since, he’s asked me real straight-faced whether I’ve drawn the crocodile yet.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 7 th August 1826_ **

Rain has fallen unceasingly these past few days, and we have been compelled to dry our collections repeatedly by artificial heat. Each evening that the breeze is sufficiently moderate, I spread out my packets of seed and my few pressed specimens as soon as we have the shelter set up and the fire kindled. Kowalski’s smaller moths and butterflies he puts in a jar of sulphur, warmed to give off lethal fumes; the larger ones he impales on a long needle shielded by a tin shade, holding the end of the needle in the fire so as to kill them by heat conduction without scorching their plumage.

It is a gruesome business, and he acknowledges it so, but he could not fund his travels otherwise, for I gather he derives most of his income from selling duplicate specimens to what he calls armchair naturalists, who sit comfortably at home and purchase discovery rights to his new species for themselves. He seems to harbour little bitterness about this, however. As he puts it, “This life ain’t for everyone, is it?”

I am sitting here now watching between paragraphs as he kills beetles, which he does swiftly and efficiently by dipping the impaled beasts into hot water with very fine forceps. There is a certain grim, utilitarian beauty both to the process and to the way he practises it, with fingers exceptionally long and knotted with knuckles like the nodes of couch-grass rhizomes. “He’ll be arthritic before he’s forty, mark my words,” my grandmother would have predicted with gloomy relish. I do not know his age but put it at about my own. And it is true that field naturalism is a young man’s endeavour and that our fellow explorers, if they reach old age at all, reach it as Francis Masson did: prematurely, and racked by rheumatism.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 10 th August 1826_ **

Kowalski has been limping slightly all day but said nothing about it. Finally I have insisted on examining him and found suppuration on his thighs where the canvas of his trousers has chafed him, as any stout cloth will do that is perpetually damp from the rains. My own epidermis would no doubt be red raw, had I not been applying goose fat at intervals as an emollient.

Usually he is a quick-tempered fellow, snapping and biting at trifles like an ill-conditioned puppy, but he submitted meekly enough to being doctored. It may be mere stoicism; there is little dignity in the situation, at all events. I have treated his lesions as best I can with balsam resin and padded them with sphagnum moss, wrapped in linen torn from my spare shirt.

With luck the weather may yet turn and allow us to walk in dry clothing two days together.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

A whole day without rain! Can’t tell you how happy I am about that. You don’t even want to _know_ why I’m so happy about that. Except that, ugh, wet clothes aren’t good clothes.

Did I tell you Fraser studied in Edinburgh? He spent two years at the medical school there, plus a year walking the wards in Paris. I asked him about it tonight while he was skinning a rabbit for supper. You wouldn’t think he was squeamish if you’d seen him jointing it and pulling out its liver for the pot and tossing the lungs to Wolf – you wouldn’t think he minded blood and guts – but he walked away from his medical practice, so I asked him why he hadn’t stuck it.

He said he’d gotten dismayed after a while by the way the world was so full of pain, so full of people looking to him to fix their lives, when there was nothing he could give except his time, and that was so little use. All the necrotic tumors, all the putrefying wounds, the puerperal fever, the cholera that’d taken his own mother years before – nothing the pharmacopeia could do for any of that, so he walked away from it all, like his father had before him.

I didn’t know what to say to him. He’s right, I suppose, but it makes him seem — I don’t know, less of a hero, I guess. But maybe that’s not fair. It’s not like he’s the first man to lose his way. Maybe he was just born in the wrong place, the wrong time?

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 12 th August 1826_ **

A long day in which we have had to pick our way slowly along the riverbank, hampered by the vast quantities of driftwood left behind by the spring meltwaters.

When we stopped to rest a while at noon, Kowalski brought up the topic of his not being able to swim, saying he supposed I might have been wondering at it. (I had of course done exactly that, though I had not liked to question him; besides which, I have found that the best way of handling him is to allow him to explain himself according to his own unpredictable timetable.)

He rolled up his shirtsleeve and pointed to the mark on his shoulder, a two-masted ship under full sail. “Most sailors don’t learn to swim,” he said. “If your ship goes down, you don’t want a slow death.”

He told me he ran away to sea in the summer of his sixteenth year and enrolled as a deckhand on the fishing brig _Champion_ , sailing up to the cod banks off Newfoundland. He came back with the ship’s name and likeness inked on his arm and was beaten by his father on the bare breech, which was not enough to stop him from sailing the summer after that, and the one after that, and again for several years.

It was a hard life, he said, but he regretted none of it, save that he would not be able to return with me to Halifax for fear of being pressed by the British navy, as he could not prove his American citizenship; for the mark would identify him as a sailor, and anyone used to the sea was liable to be pressed into service. This I assume he means in jest; no gentleman of any nationality need fear the press in Halifax, and (in my company at least) he is clearly a gentleman.

Such a mark might however be used to identify our remains should we not reach civilisation, so that mine might be returned to Nova Scotia and his to Massachusetts, and that prospect dismays me rather more than mortality itself. Perhaps it is because I have been alone for so much of my life that I fear it in death. A foolish thought, in any case, for if we should perish here our bodies will lie as undiscovered and forgotten as my father’s must, somewhere out in the wilderness.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 14 th August 1826_ **

Kowalski is scribbling into his letters what I assume is an edited account of our travails, and one (I would hope for his sweetheart’s sake) in cleaner language than he is wont to use in my presence. Today we have finally reached the pass into this valley, having climbed the shoulder of what he has christened “Mount Muddy ----er”, in order to bypass the impenetrable boulder field around a series of rapids. Much as I deplore the obscenity, I cannot but agree with the sentiment. He swears at inanimate objects only, never at me or the wolf or God help him one of his precious insects, and whilst his language may be earthy, it is seldom profane.

We have gained this new valley, in any case, and may we find less to swear at in the vistas that now open to us. The woods are thicker here, the scrubby stands of spruce augmented by jack pine, aspens, birches and firs, and the Harricana itself is considerably narrower; I begin to wonder whether in fog or heavy rain we may have missed one of its many forks and followed a lesser tributary instead of the main flow. Our longitude is impossible to judge accurately, the compound errors of a month’s worth of estimated distances and bearings rendering them almost useless, but our general trend has certainly been more easterly than I would have liked.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

We came to yet another fork in the river today. The left-hand branch looked bigger to me, but Fraser said it was heading too far east, so we’d better ford it and take the more southerly one. It was one of the fastest stretches we’ve tried to cross so far, thundering down this narrow chute, hemmed in by rocky banks. I chopped down a pine that reached about halfway across, and then from there Fraser waded in with a line of plaited rawhide, with me ready to haul him back if he lost his footing.

He wouldn’t admit it was dangerous. He never does. (He’s an idiot. I said that before, right?) You’d think – if you didn’t know him – that he wasn’t scared of anything. But just before he let go the pine branches, he turned to me and said real quick, “Promise me you’ll head back downstream, if you’re left alone. Take the gun, shot-pouch, powder, and tinderbox, and dump the rest. Head downstream, and ask whatever Indians you meet for help. Tell them to take you back to Moose Factory. Promise me.”

So, yes, then I was scared. He says something like that, he really thinks he might die.

But he made it across the river and chopped down a couple more trees on that side to make a better bridge, and then he tied down his end of the rope and hauled me and our packs over. And now we’re heading more or less south again.

Maybe I shouldn’t tell you stuff like this? But if you’re reading this, I guess I made it home safe…

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 17 th August 1826_ **

Thick mist and drizzly rain again, unrelenting. Our blankets have been so drenched in spite of the squares of oilcloth in which we wrapped them that they are steaming yet, though they have been hanging over the fire this hour or more. Kowalski I think is already asleep where he has propped himself against a balsam fir, heedless of the thin stream of water running down its trunk and into his collar. I ought to wake him and make him wrap himself up, whether his blanket is fully dry or not.

I myself have been dozing on and off as I sit here. Were I to lie down and let true sleep come, I suspect I would feel no better rested; my dreams have become disturbing of late, filled with violence and grief. I do not believe nightmares to be truly prophetic, warning of a future one might thereby avoid, but perhaps it is possible they may be provoked by an uneasy consciousness of a path not taken.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

Stella, did you know maple syrup isn’t maple sap? They take the sap, yes, but then they boil it and boil it and boil it down till it’s almost gone, and _that’s_ the syrup. But that’s not obvious, is it? I’m not an idiot for not knowing that, right?

Fraser didn’t call me an idiot. Didn’t have to, never does. He just looks at me the way you’d look at a bug. And you know what? He’s never made maple syrup either. Never even seen it made. He’s just read a description somewhere. He acts like he’s an expert in everything, and all he really knows is what he’s gotten from books.

Maybe he knows everything ever written down, maybe he can identify twice as many plants as me without even trying, and recognize every songbird by its voice alone, but he doesn’t know much about people. Not as much as he thinks he does, anyway.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 18 th August 1826_ **

The stream we have been following for a few days took a sharp rightwards turn today up towards the ridge and came to an abrupt end in a smallish tarn fed by a mere trickle. I left Kowalski to cut a track through the deadfall and shin-tangle along the contours whilst I headed up and over the ridge to check whether there was a better route in the next valley. The ridge proving impassable due to the steepness of its westerly cliffs, however, I cut back down to the level at which I had left him, and found him marching determinedly in a direction several compass points away from the one on which we had agreed.

“That hill over there – I told you to head for that hill over there!” I said peevishly, when I caught him up.

“Right,” he said, puzzled, pointing at nothing in particular on the horizon. “Over there? That’s what I’m doing.”

I had thought him content to let me take the lead; I was quite unaware that he could barely perceive the distant hills’ existence, never mind tell one from another. Even when I confronted him, he refused for the longest time to admit it. At length he confessed that he had a pair of spectacles when he set out from Boston, but that they were smashed in a fall as he crossed the Rocky Mountains last year, and he has not of course been able to replace them since.

It is a strange and dangerous thing to have kept from me, and I confess I am perturbed he had not felt able to confide in me. Perturbed, but not angry: partly because it would be unwise to fall out with one’s only companion, but mostly because it is difficult to be truly angry with a man who shouts defiance with such defeat in his countenance.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

Send me some wings, would you, Stella, so I can fly home like the geese?

I wish you were here. I wish you’d written me, at least. I guess you did, only it didn’t reach me. It’s just, there’s things I have to ask you, and I—

I don’t know. Just wish I could speak to you, that’s all.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 20 th August 1826_ **

After two days of crossing poorly drained country bereft of watercourses, we have finally hit upon a substantial river. Whether this is another tributary of the Harricana or possibly some branch of the Nottaway, I cannot say. Our longitude becomes less and less easy to estimate with each passing week, and heading upstream on this new river will take us even further east of south than our previous course, but I think it best to follow it rather than continue to flounder through the boglands or risk finding ourselves short of water on the barren elevations.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 22 nd August 1826_ **

I have seen Kowalski angry before; I have provoked him not infrequently into pointing out my arrogance and taxing me with fraudulence whenever he discovers some fragment or other of my knowledge is second-hand, as so much of it is. Yet I had not thought it in me to push any man to the breaking point. I had not thought myself so pettish.

This, however, I have now achieved. I had been priding myself upon my philosophical approach of avoiding anger and reproaches, but today I abandoned it so far as to ask Kowalski, as it seems he can neither swim nor see, what else he cannot do; and he knocked me sideways like a skittle.

My jaw is swollen to one side, and I sit here thoroughly dissatisfied with myself. He will not meet my eyes. Where we go from here, literally or figuratively, I cannot tell.

*

 **_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ ** _[Transcriber’s note: this entry was crossed out but is still just legible.]_

I can’t do this, Stella, I can’t. I can’t. I have to get out of here. If I walk out on him, we’ll both die – no one can survive here alone, not even him – so I don’t have a choice. But I can’t do this.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Whole lot of pages here that I’ll have to rip out before I send you any of this. Don’t worry about me, it’ll all be fine once I get back. I just have to keep walking, keep praying, keep walking.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 23 rd August 1826_ **

Today we passed through an area infested with poison ivy, an area too large to skirt without great loss of time, and I now have patches of pruritic vesicles wherever my trousers are rent. I am morally certain that Kowalski has similar lesions from when he stumbled into a patch of the leaves, but that he would not allow me to examine them even if I asked.

I rush to do more than my share of the domestic tasks, but he is unmollified. Anger and resentment fester in this place. There is no escape from them. They are unrelenting irritants, like mosquito bites under the strap of a pack.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 31 st August 1826_ **

Our fourth day in this abandoned trapper’s cabin; I have not had the heart to update my journal before now. A corner of the shingled roof still remains, and I have mended it as best I can with bark and fir boughs so that we will at least have shelter from the elements for however long we are compelled to remain here.

Kowalski is lying against the wall, asleep or in some state between sleep and delirium; he has been wavering between the two since we arrived. I had noticed him limping for some days following a fall into a patch of poison ivy, but I thought it merely the lingering effects of the skin lesions. I persuaded myself to believe it so, in any case, being unwilling to check. Now I find that he tore his shin open on a tree stump as he fell, and the wound has swollen grossly, with putrefaction spreading into the bloodstream.

I have dosed him with steel, Jesuit’s bark and a few grains of Dover’s powder, all that my little store of medicaments could afford, but he remains in an alarming state, his fever accompanied by dysentery. His constitution is, I think, naturally strong, but it has been much weakened by the continual labour, insalubrious climate and meagre victuals of the last month, and I fear for the outcome. The wound I have washed with the juice of spruce root and poulticed with tallow and a little wild honey, but for the poisoned blood there is little that can be done.

I find myself calculating again and again how many hundreds of miles we have yet to go, and how many we would have to retrace if we turned back north. I could carry him, perhaps, along with some supplies, but not my collections and not his; and I believe he would die here before he would allow me to abandon those.

(He will not die, he will not. I wish I had not written that word at all. I thought I had long outgrown all superstitious beliefs, but for the first time in many years I have caught myself muttering aloud what amounts to a prayer, and although I might claim it is Kowalski to whom I am talking, I know he is no longer able to hear.)

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 1 st September 1826_ **

No change in his condition.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 2 nd September 1826_ **

No change. The wolf lying disconsolate by his side.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 9 th September 1826_ **

A long time since my last entry, but I have at last sufficient spare time and quietude of mind to write a short account of the preceding week or so.

We lay in the cabin for seven days whilst Kowalski grew if anything sicker and sicker. On the eighth day I smelled smoke on the wind and, having set out to find its source, discovered a native encampment on a lakeshore a couple of miles to our east. Leaving the wolf to guard our packs, I carried Kowalski down the next morning, along with a few of the metal goods we still possessed (a small copper cooking vessel, a knife, a few needles and lengths of wire) and asked for whatever help they could give, and to their credit they took us in, allowing us space in one of their lodges.

They had surprisingly little in the way of medicine beside their prayers (and I had myself already been reduced for some time to begging for intercession from a deity in whom I have not fully believed since early youth), so Kowalski’s survival of the febrile crisis I can ascribe only to his innate stubbornness and tenacity; but they did at least provide him with a companionable babble of voices, and with a change in diet once he was capable of taking nourishment, including cornmeal sweetened with maple sugar and mixed with a greater variety of berries (dried and fresh) than we had been consuming hitherto, limited as we had been to those I could recognise as edible.

Under this care he was rendered in a few more days capable of sitting, and then of standing. I thought it best not to trespass further on the hospitality of a people themselves so reduced and penurious, and therefore as soon as he was able to walk a little way I helped him up the slope, out of sight, and then carried him the rest of the way here.

The fever has not returned, and he continues to improve day by day. Should there be a God in heaven after all, may He know that I am not unthankful.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

You ever woken up tied to a tree? I did. There I was, half awake, lashed tight to a white spruce, gun in hand, pointing it at Fraser. I didn’t know what the ~~hell~~ heck was happening. He claims that he had to yell “I’m not a bear! It’s me – Fraser!” and that he had to drop all his bundles and strip off his cloak and shirt and show his bare skin before I would lower the gun. Maybe that’s true, maybe it’s just one of his stories, but I was pretty out of it, so it could be true.

Don’t panic, Stella, I’m fine now, but I’d been feverish and gotten the flux, so he’d had to take me to some native village and nurse me there a while. I was still shaky when we left, so he had to help me walk. I sort of remember that, but also I sort of don’t. It’s sort of blurry. So once we’d gotten far enough away, he tied me to a tree so I wouldn’t wander off, and he left me with the gun in case of bears while he went back to where he’d stashed our packs with Wolf to guard them, safe from the natives.

…So, right, I just checked this with him, and he says no, that’s not why he stashed our packs away, he just couldn’t carry everything. Now he’s angry at me, says I shouldn’t have implied the Indians would’ve stolen from us, says he took them some trade goods but wished he’d taken more, that he couldn’t repay them enough for their kindness, that they gave us their food, and in return he brought them sickness, maybe the seeds of contagion. I hope I didn’t. I didn’t mean to hurt them. Didn’t mean to hurt anyone.

Aw, heck. He won’t be mad at me long, he’s too happy I didn’t die. And Wolf is real glad to see us both again, anyway.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 11 th September 1826_ **

A few miles today, perhaps four, which is more than might have been expected so soon, though I cannot help but be conscious of having lost a great deal of time and of the fast approach of autumn. We must make the best of it; there would be no point in pushing Kowalski beyond his present strength.

He remains well, remarkably well, given his condition only a short time since. He is sitting now in his old accustomed place across the campfire, writing in his letter-journal. I wonder whether he ever writes to anyone but Miss DuBois. In his illness he called me by another name once or twice, his brother’s, perhaps, though I have not asked him whom he meant. It would be intolerable to quote back to a fellow the words he spoke only in fever dreams.

Meanwhile I have plenty of spare time to while away of an evening. The cup I have been carving for him is almost complete, and I have scoured it smooth with river sand. Tonight when his attention was elsewhere I abstracted a little melted fat from our supper of roasted duck to rub into the wood and bring out its grain.

(It is absurd the lengths to which I will go in order to be rewarded by a smile from him. Absurd, foolish, predictable. As long as he is not aware of the reasons, however, there is surely no harm done?)

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

Walking again. Not very fast, but we’re moving, making headway.

Fraser would carry half my pack if I let him. I guess it’s the doctor in him. Sometimes I get seized with dizziness if I stoop to grab a beetle or something, but otherwise I’m fine. We’ve lost too much time already. Have to keep moving.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 13 th September 1826_ **

I have finally given Kowalski the cup I was making, and he is as pleased as ever I could have wished, admiring the smoothness of the wood where I had scooped out the bowl and scored it into the likeness of a snapping-turtle’s shell. He laughed aloud at its handle, carved into the shape of a half-swallowed human arm, extended from the creature’s beak with its fingers spread in alarm.

To my surprise he rooted around in his pack and handed me a gift in exchange: a spoon made of reindeer antler (which he called “carreboeuf” horn), its handle an elongated, stylised wolf crouching on the world, its tail curled around the world-rim, its muzzle raised as it howled at the moon. He told me he had started carving it on his journey over the Rocky Mountains, long before we met. When I asked why in that case he had chosen that particular animal, he said that it just seemed to fit the piece of antler, and that he subsequently agreed to accompany me largely because I was “the one with the wolf”.

It is a beautiful thing, robust yet delicately made, equally utilitarian and decorative. He said an old deckhand taught him to carve scrimshaw long ago on the _Champion_ , and that he has been watching me busy at my own carving when I thought him unaware. What touches me particularly is that he has carried this gift in his pack for weeks until he knew I had something ready to give him in return; and on a journey such as this any extra weight in one’s backpack is no small matter.

“You’re not the only one with secrets,” he said. I must remember in future not to underestimate him.

 *

**_Fraser’s journal, 14 th September 1826_ **

A slow day, as we had two deep gullies to cross, both thickly covered with brushwood that impeded our progress and gave us considerable trouble. On a positive note, I collected three new species, or what I believe to be new. Having no remaining paper, I have started to transfer pressed specimens to the unused leaves of this journal.

Kowalski’s wound has knit well, and he managed the steep terrain without problems. I notice, now I know what to look for, that when he wishes to see anything beyond a dozen yards he tips his head and narrows one eye a little. What I mistook for a generalised antagonism towards the world at large is perhaps only the wariness of myopia.

He tells me that he was rendered almost blind by a fishhook in this eye as a youth and that at the time it was thought he might lose his sight altogether. I can recall my father prescribing a sea cure for one of his patients similarly afflicted, recommending it for the clean air, the salt spray, and the enforced absence from deciphering print by candlelight. When I mentioned this to Kowalski, he laughed wryly and said that for him the injury was what cast him ashore and put paid to his sailing days.

“Good thing, I guess,” he said. “Hard to take at the time, but I would’ve been drunk overboard before I hit twenty, else. Hindsight, huh?”

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

Dear Stella, I don’t have a lot to say, I’m just trying to stay awake here. Kettle of pemmican on the fire, going to take a while to soften up enough to chew. I’ve already fallen asleep once already. I do that again, damn thing’s going to boil dry and burn a hole in the base, and it’s the only kettle we’ve got.

Fraser told me it was his turn to cook again tonight. Said it real insistent. Then he sat down to poke the fire, and he’s gone to sleep like that, with his pack still hanging off one shoulder. The scratching of pencil on damp paper won’t wake him, but I’m writing extra quiet just in case. So talk to me, will you, Stella? Or just listen to me. Don’t let me drift off.

Fraser looks so young when he’s asleep. Young like he shouldn’t even be out here, like someone should’ve told him to stay home, that he doesn’t have to keep looking for whatever he’s looking for. (He tells people it’s plants, specimens, but that’s ~~bullsh~~ not the whole truth, I know it’s not. It took him the longest time to tell me about his father, how they searched and searched and never found a trace of him. I guess Fraser’s not looking to find him, not really, not anymore. He’s just looking.)

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 15 th September 1826_ **

Another dry night. Dry for a few days now. We are camped on a rising bluff of high bare rocks with very little herbage and have had to search out small shrubs for firewood, the country hereabout being destitute of timber.

Kowalski is dressing the supper over the fire, muttering Ave Marias absentmindedly to himself, as he has taken to doing lately. He borrowed a handful of beads some time ago from the small stock we carry for trading and wears them now on twine wrapped twice around his wrist, a sort of makeshift rosary. My grandmother would hardly have approved of what she would have termed popery, but the repetition seems to soothe his mind, whether or not he holds it to have any real meaning (which is a thing into which I do not like to inquire).

He does not appear troubled by his faith’s more arbitrary prohibitions, at least. It is a Friday today, if I have counted the dates correctly, but he will eat the flesh currently roasting over the flames with as much appetite as on any other day. He told me bluntly once that if it is a sin merely to desire a thing, then “I’m damned if I ain’t going to do the act as well.” Syntactically and theologically suspect, I fear, but the notion has an attraction to it.

He has just dropped the meat into the fire, fished it out again, and handed me the less ashy half, cheerful and unabashed. There is a kind of grace in his least graceful movements to which one cannot help but warm. This is where the classical notions of beauty fail, all those fixed and lifeless statues, those Adonises and Apollos. The appeal lies in the motion, or so it seems to me: in the breathing, laughing, careless, dirt-streaked life.

Ah, the meat is hot, and I am dripping grease onto the page. I must go.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

We’ve stopped for a midday rest, and Wolf and I are lying here lazy in the shade. It’s some kind of paradise. A dusty kind, but I’ll take it.

Fraser’s up on the ridge still, sweating in the sun, examining some tall handsome Compositae he’s found in a patch of dry gravelly soil. A new sort of Solidago, I think. He’s been waiting weeks to find a plant in seed.

Tap, tap, tap, that’s him shaking the seeds into a paper packet. In a moment he’ll glance down at me to see if I’m busy. He’ll want me to sketch it for him if it’s a new species, only he doesn’t like to ask direct.

Yes, it must be. Speak to you later, Stella.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 16 th September 1826_ **

I opened my book to this page in good faith, meaning to make out my daily account like a dutiful pilgrim, but I find – yet again – that I have not the time. This journal used to be my sole companion, but it must now share me with Kowalski, whose sunny tuneless humming will so often persuade me to lay down my pencil and pay attention to him instead...

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

We’re back in thick forest, mostly jack pine and spruce. Better shelter, now that it’s raining again. It makes it harder to see what progress we’ve made, though, and harder to see where we’re going.

Harder to see what might be after us, too. Nearly got attacked by a bear yesterday, a big one. It grabbed at Fraser but only caught him by the shirt, which it ripped apart before he could twist away. I took a wild pot-shot at it – wouldn’t normally have risked shooting so close to Fraser, I’m not that great a shot, but I didn’t have much choice – and the slug went right through its skull and laid it flat.

Fraser scraped the pelt clean, and now he’s smoking it over the fire to try to cure it and kill off the parasites. He’s kept a pot of the fat, too. Says it’s useful for all sorts of things. Seriously, Stella, you never smelled anything this bad, ever. I know I probably don’t smell too great right now, but if there’s anything stinks worse than me, it’s a man coated in bear grease.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 18 th September 1826_ **

The river has dwindled to a stream, and the stream to nothing more than a beck, not worth tracking to its source in the low hills to the east. From here we must walk on a bearing, heading due south as best we can. I hope we may soon pass beyond the catchment of Hudson’s Bay and cross the continent’s watershed, and from there find the headwaters of a south-flowing river. We could simply continue to cross open country, but to follow a river would be preferable, both as a source of clean water and easy game, and as a gap in the tree-cover that will permit us access to the sun’s warmth by day and the stars’ guidance by night.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 20 th September 1826_ **

The skin on my feet is rotting, and although I keep debriding it, the process leaves sores that will not heal. Kowalski’s feet are not in much better a state, so I feel justified in having suggested a stop. We are camped tonight on the shores of a huge chain of lakes that stretches further than can be seen, and we have it in mind to remain here another night or two. Both of us are fatigued in mind and body, worn down to the greatest extremity, and I believe a few days’ recuperation may in the long run save us more time than it loses.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

Lake lands! You’d love it here, Stella. It’s heaven, assuming heaven is full of loons calling over the water, which it is, stands to reason.

The skin on Fraser’s ankles started to suppurate, so we’ve had to stop and rest. He wasn’t going to, obviously, because he’s a Fraser, and Frasers don’t get to crack. I had to act exhausted (which, yes, I am, but I usually try not to let it show that much), and that made him give in.

Which means we have time to waste, for once. The lake’s shallow near the shore, so it warms up in the sun (or at least it’s not as crazy cold as the rivers), and I’ve been paddling, letting my feet wash clean.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 23 rd September 1826_ **

I know that every day we stay here is a day closer to winter, that we must move on, and yet it seems a place removed from time, as if we could stay here forever, he and I. Autumn will never come, the geese will never fly south, and we can lie here dipping our toes in the sun-bathed shallows, the wolf swimming out from time to time to retrieve the birds I shoot for our suppers. It is a false Arcadia, but Arcadia all the same.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

I’ve found a pair of abandoned Indian lodges, with the remnants of an old canoe frame on a canoe-rest, one of those platforms where they sometimes leave boats hull-up to protect them from groundwater. There’s other traces of Indians nearby – a fire pit and a bundle of spruce roots for making watape – but nothing recent. The birches and balsam firs for some way around here have been stripped of their rind, but the ax-cuts are all old. Guess they’re not coming back for their boat any time soon.

I spent a while examining it before I told Fraser about it. Didn’t want to get his hopes up in case it couldn’t be fixed. But I think it can be. Today I’ve been gathering bark to clothe it, along with resin and spruce roots. Tomorrow I’ll see if it can be mended.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 24 th September 1826_ **

Kowalski has bet me a spare pair of socks (about which he is bluffing, for I know he does not possess any) that he can make the boat seaworthy, and he turns out to be far handier than I, though we have both seen birch-bark canoes patched before. His ascent of the Columbia from Fort Vancouver was in solid-built York boats, as far as the landscape allowed for passage by water at all, but from the river Athabasca onwards he travelled in bark vessels, and he says he watched them being mended on several occasions.

He has been talking as he worked of the many ships he has known – cutters, coasters, fishing smacks, tugs – and where a man has such bubbling enthusiasm for sails and steam mechanisms alike, it is no great surprise that he should be equally absorbed in the homelier mysteries of thwarts and bark-rolls. I have been assisting him with the heating of the gum and the division of roots for watape, but after a while I left him to do all the finer work, whenever he did not need me to hold a seam shut while he sewed or gummed it, and have busied myself instead in the carving of a pair of paddles.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

While the gum’s been drying out, Fraser’s been teaching me to swim in case the canoe founders. “Just keep kicking like a frog,” he says. I’ve already told him over and over that sailors don’t swim, that it’s better to have a quick death if your boat sinks mid-ocean, but he insists I have to learn in case we sink near the shore.

He’s been making a big show of checking the shallows for turtles. One thing you have to give him, he might treat me like an idiot at times, but he’s not worried about acting the fool himself, so long as it makes me laugh and gets me in the water.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 26 th September 1826_ **

It could not be said that Kowalski has learnt to swim, but he has at least learnt to stop panicking, keep his head above water and allow me to tow him, which I pray will be enough to keep him safe should we capsize (which we surely must, sooner or later).

Our possessions we have secured in tarpaulins, well lashed, with deer bladders attached via stout twine to act as buoys, so that they can be located if they are lost overboard. The gun and powder-horn I shall wrap in oilcloths and keep on my back, for those we must not lose at any cost.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

Finally got the canoe finished this morning. We had to guess how much resin and bear fat to use in our gum, but she’s held water, and we’ve crossed the lake without accident. She’s not a thing of beauty, but she held together. If the rest of my life goes belly-up, maybe I’ll go and be a ship’s carpenter after all. You think you’d be happy as a carpenter’s wife?

Fraser had the last-minute panic I knew he’d have about taking the canoe away from the poor natives, and I had to point out yet again that it was just an old skeleton and that we’d done all the hard work. He still left more than its worth in trade goods, propped up by the remains of their cook-fire.

We’ll have to carry the damn boat now if the lakes come to an end. “Apportage,” Fraser says, because of course he knows a fancy word for back-breaking labor. But it doesn’t look like we’ll get to an end of these lakes any time soon.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 27 th September 1826_ **

There is an alarmingly narrow gap between the waterline and the boat’s rim (the “gunnel”, as Kowalski calls it, or perhaps “gunwale”, a word I have never met but in its written form). We must hope for no very violent weather whilst afloat. But the vessel, though deeply laden, is sufficient for two men, two packs, and one wolf, and we should in addition be able to transport a large portion of whatever game we can kill, which is a great advantage over walking. 

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

My arms and back hurt like the devil. Hands blistered from the paddles, too. Guess we’ve gotten used to walking, not making shift with our arms. Going to have to grow some new muscles if we’re going to make much headway. I’ll write more later. Hurts right now.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 28 th September 1826_ **

Kowalski suggested that with the breeze behind us (as it usually is, the prevailing wind in these parts being from the northwest) we could add an outrigger for stability and raise a sail, thereby saving ourselves much time and effort. Today I agreed at last to try it, with my blanket rigged between a couple of stout saplings, and it was a sight to raise the heart: the water fairly racing by, Kowalski bracing the mast with both legs and one arm, the other hauling at the boom; I meanwhile serving as steersman, trying to wield my oar as a rudder according to his shouted instructions, and he cursing fluently at my ineptitude (a thing in which he has ever taken great delight). While the grateful wind and open water last, our progress is cheering.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

We make strange sailors, Stella, you’d laugh to see us. The wind fresh and squally, the boat skipping over the water, and Fraser striking up in song: “What care we for wind or weather?”

Tacking is still tricky – we take in too much water to windward and we’ve no hands free to bail – and once the banks narrow we’ll have to go back to paddling, but it’s great while it lasts.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 29 th September 1826_ **

I shall have little time for writing again tonight, I suspect. My journals have always tended towards the verbose for want of anyone else to talk to, but now I have but to lay down my pencil and Kowalski will lay his own down, waiting for whatever nonsense I might spout, whatever tale I might spin just to keep him listening, just to make him laugh.

If I spoke what was truly in my heart, he might listen even to that. I am not such a fool, of course. I have an infinite stock of tales to spin.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

I’m glad we took the bearskin, now we’ve got the canoe to carry it in. The weather’s still warm during the day, but it’s getting dark early now, and the nights are cold, too cold to sleep easy. There’s been a cold rain the last couple of nights, too, so we’ve turned the boat hull-up and camped underneath, with the bearskin spread on a mat of spruce boughs to keep it off the ground. Makes a difference, having it. It’d be warmer wrapped up in it, though. I’m going to point that out, if Fraser doesn’t figure it out soon himself.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 30 th September 1826_ **

From what I recall of the map, I had planned to seek the river Gatineau or the Saint-Maurice, which should flow southwards from hereabouts, but the map was sketchy, my memory is untrustworthy, and I have in any case no precise notion of where our “hereabouts” is. The lake outlet we reached today is the first southerly-trending stream we have encountered for some time, however, so I mean to try it and see where it leads. It must be a tributary to some greater watercourse, and whichever river that turns out to be, we may with luck be able to trace its whole chain to the St. Lawrence.

I have consulted Kowalski, for form’s sake, but he merely shakes his head to shed the information, much as the wolf shakes off water, and interrupts me to say “I trust you, Fraser.” He is neither child nor simpleton to be fed comforting lies, but in the face of such faith in my abilities I can hardly confess to having been lost for weeks, and I am not sure he would believe me even if I did.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

This is the life, Stella. We’ll make better time in a few days with the canoe than in weeks of walking, even though we have to keep stopping to mend the bark and get it fresh-gummed.

We just... Hey, it’s not Fraser’s fault, but it’s hard to know which shores to follow. It all kind of looks the same. Have to try and guess with each opening whether it’s a bay we can cut straight past or whether it’s the head of a river. We took a lot of wrong turns today.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 1 st October 1826_ **

Having taken our craft some miles downstream, we found our little river petering out into impenetrable low-lying marshy ground and have been forced to retrace our route to the lake, a matter of considerable labour which has left us weary and despondent. To make matters worse, the canoe was badly torn by a protruding branch lodged in the riverbed and took us some hours to repair.

Tomorrow we must replenish our stock of bark and resin, and continue eastwards along the shore in the hope of striking a more promising outlet, a more considerable stream.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

A strong westerly breeze today, whipping up an angry swell. We’ve had to stick close to the shore, haven’t made much progress. It’s come on to rain hard now, so we’ve given up for the day.

Wolf has stalked off into the woods in a sulk. He doesn’t care much for sailing. Fraser is busy shaping a new ax handle to replace the one that split, getting the heft of it just right with his curved-knife. No idle hours for him. But I’m not idling, I’m writing to you. That counts, right?

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 3 rd October 1826_ **

Today we reached the headwaters of another river and in spite of frequent cascades, several of which required portage, we have travelled at least fifty miles downstream in eight hours, which gives some idea of its headlong current. If we continue at this pace, we should gain the St. Lawrence not very much later than originally projected.

Dead trees and other flotsam lying far above the current shoreline suggest that the water levels hereabouts have dropped some ten feet since the spring thaw, making the rapids considerably less fierce than they must have been, although it has also brought some of the boulders perilously close to the surface. I begin to wonder how often a birchbark canoe may be patched before it becomes more patch than boat.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 4 th October 1826_ **

We encountered a particularly large stretch of impassable falls early this morning and were obliged to haul the canoe some distance around them. The slope being steep and thickly wooded, cutting a sufficiently wide pathway took us at least three hours. Directly below this, the river entered a narrow defile where it was confined to a breadth of thirty yards, powerfully strong and encumbered by rocks. We debated for some time how much farther we could afford to carry the vessel, given that repeated trips would be necessary to transport both it and its contents, and finally, having scouted ahead for several miles and found no clear water, we decided to risk running the rapids.

This we have undertaken and have emerged with our lives and persons intact, but to our great chagrin our canoe has been lost. Where the river was split into two by a rocky island bristling with stunted trees, the craft was swept by main force into the right-hand channel, where in the churning water it was upended and dashed to pieces on the shattering rocks.

Fortunately we had tumbled out before this, and by luck alone we made it to the shore, neither of us badly hurt, though Kowalski was very nearly swept away afterwards in an attempt to retrieve our buoyed bundles of possessions, which had been flung into one of the fiercest of the rapids. Having kept hold of the gun and powder-horn (the most essential means of our survival, slung across my back at the time), I was all for leaving the rest where they had fallen, but Kowalski would not be persuaded out of his determination to save our journals and specimens. This he managed to do at last, sliding his feet along the riverbed to prevent the current ripping his feet from under him, and holding onto me with one arm as I clung in turn to a stout piece of timber laid bare by the torrent. Whether his collections are truly more valuable to him than life itself, or whether he is simply the most stubborn man in Christendom and cannot stand to be bested by mere elements, I could not say.

Nevertheless our precious canoe is long gone, its wreckage borne away downstream at appalling speed. I doubt the labour of constructing another would be worthwhile, even if the materials could be obtained. We cannot be a great distance from civilised settlements now, however inaccurate my estimates. We must continue on foot, in greater safety if not comfort, and make the best time we can.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

A feast tonight: curculionid grubs picked out of a rotting log, boiled and pounded into a mess of hickory-nut porridge. Didn’t taste of much, and we can’t afford to be picky about what Fraser’d call proteinaceous victuals.

You don’t want to hear about it? Fine. I’m not that keen to talk about it, either.

We’re making slower progress again now. The boat was good while it lasted. My boots are about worn out, so I’m saving up scraps of hide and fur and sinew to make moccasins, or for Fraser to make them. He’s better with skins and needles. Had practice at that, I guess, what with all the sewing up of people he’s done.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 6 th October 1826_ **

Dusk, on a raw wet evening. Kowalski is asleep already, his gentle snoring almost drowned out by the chorus of raindrops hitting the tarpaulin and the battered, mould-spotted leaves of the deciduous trees.

The forest, hitherto largely coniferous, has become more and more mixed as we have travelled southwards. It is thickly scattered now with balsam poplars, aspens and maples, the latter already acquiring their autumnal colours. Nut trees, too, which are not unwelcome: hickory, walnut, hazel.

This particular area seems to have considerable surviving game, judging by the number of ticks to be found lurking on the undergrowth. Unfortunately we have succeeded in shooting none of the deer and have instead acquired all of their parasites. It is not a comforting thing to find a single bloodthirsty speck edging its crabwise way up one’s leg and to know that there are surely a dozen of its fellows already harboured in all one’s higher crannies.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

I officially hate this valley. It’s wet, it’s muddy, it’s thick with deadwood, and it’s crawling with ticks. We have to keep stripping and checking for them, and there’s no dignity in that. It’s worse than being checked for lice by old Mrs. Lucian at the dame school – remember that? They crawl inch by inch up our bodies and lodge in the worst places, and if we find any we have to pull them out real careful with my beetle-forceps, so the mouthparts don’t get left in our flesh.

It’s the first time in a while I’ve gotten a close look at Fraser – we kind of gave up on washing all that much – but it’s hard to miss how much thinner he’s gotten. Sometimes in the evenings I’ve been scowling at the cook-pot and wondering if he’s taken more than his share (not seriously wondering, because he’s Fraser and he wouldn’t do that, but you think crazy things when you’re that hungry), but no, he hasn’t been taking more than his share. Maybe he’s been taking less.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 8 th October 1826_ **

I have cut and sewn the bearskin into one large sleeping roll, as the breadth was insufficient for two smaller ones. I thought Kowalski might object and was wondering whether in that case I would have the fortitude to offer him the whole skin, but he merely said “You got room to spare?” and without further comment threw himself down beside me and pulled the edges of the fur closed under him.

He made for a difficult bed-mate at first, kicking and twitching. Eventually I flung an arm and a leg over him to pin him down, and to my surprise he complied, huffed one breath against my ear, and slept soundly; more soundly than I, truth be told. He was, I suppose, used to sharing a bed with his brother in childhood, and no doubt lived in close quarters on the various ships on which he has sailed. He seems to be happier, nonetheless, if there is some element of coercion or compulsion to it; if it could not be said to be his choice.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

Dear Stella,

Picked the ticks out. Eaten supper (which took a whole two minutes). Fraser is—

Hey, you know what? Fraser’s not doing anything interesting. You know why all these damn letters are full of him and nothing else? Because there _is_ nothing else. Remember how we used to play house in the broom closet? Remember when I kissed you because you were so pretty with those stupid red bows in your hair that I couldn’t help it? Right, but forget the red bows, that’s not the point. The point is – I don’t know, I guess it’s that me and Fraser have this whole vast empty continent, but we’re sort of trapped alone in a broom closet, too. Stuck like that, you have to learn to love what you can’t afford to hate.

I still hate hickory nuts, though. Nothing much to eat around here but them and hazelnuts and walnuts and fungi, and you can’t walk far on an empty belly. We’ve been busy thinking up all the luxuries we’ll have as soon as we get home. I say broiled honeyed ham, ripe cheese, hothouse grapes. Fraser says porridge, and when I try to shout him down, he says “...made with milk and syrup.” That’s his idea of luxury.

I’d been thinking of him as wealthy, but there’s one or two things he’s said made me realize he was poor for a while, real poor. After his father went missing, it was years before a death certificate got issued and his estate got released. Fraser was just a kid, and he was left in the care of their housekeeper. Maybe she might’ve sold some of old Dr. Fraser’s scientific collections, but she didn’t have the authority for that. So for a while they lived on nothing but porridge and oatcakes, till Fraser’s grandmother arrived from Scotland to take charge – and she was the one who wouldn’t let him have milk or sugar. She said it’d make him soft.

My own upbringing was kind of tough, I guess, with all those expectations piled on me that I was never going to live up to, but I’ve come to envy his less and less. I hope we reach civilization soon, just so he can have his porridge with all the syrup he wants.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 10 th October 1826_ **

We awoke today to a sharp hoar-frost coating the branches. To lie alone in such weather would be bitter indeed; I am more grateful than I can express for the shared warmth of our bearskin.

(If occasionally I might wish that Kowalski shared my darker inclinations, I do not mean it with any degree of seriousness. I cannot in fairness wish him to be other than he is. In spite of his frequent and outspoken exasperation with my failings, I believe he bears me as much affection as is consistent with his nature; it suits me to believe it so, in any case.)

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

Fraser asked me today what my first name was. I said I never used it, and he turned away before I could explain. I didn’t mean to hurt his feelings. I’m not sure I’d remember to call him anything but Fraser even if he asked me to.

Funny thing is, he’s always pronounced “Kowalski” wrong. Only, his way of saying it has kind of started sounding right.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 11 th October 1826_ **

Frosty again, and the ice remained on the puddles late into the day. Kowalski has been stomping wordlessly along in what passes for new boots: scraps of blanket and then buckskin wrapped around the remains of his stockings, the whole covered by a pair of moccasins in bearskin, scraped and soaked and chewed as best I could and sewn into the approximate shape of boots.

I can only imagine what pain he must be in, for he does not complain of it, other than to give an involuntary wince when I unwrap his feet at night so that the bindings may be hung to dry over the fire.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

I ought to get up. Fraser’s busy out there, trying to find dry bark or birch canker to stock up the tinderbox for tomorrow. My feet hurt so bad, I just don’t care. I’m going to lie here with my toes propped by the fire like none of this is happening. Can’t complain to Fraser, because he’s the one pretending his own boots don’t leak. But you don’t care if I’m useless, do you, Stella? You love me anyway, right? There must be a lost letter somewhere, telling me you do.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 13 th October 1826_ **

Snow on and off throughout last night. I was obliged to rise three times to rekindle the fire, for the cold was so bitter that even Kowalski was lying wakeful, which is not his wont. Dawn comes late now, and in the chill reaches of the night one can feel more lost than ever.

Kowalski spoke, as he seldom does in daylight, of his sweetheart: something about a letter he had been waiting for and had not received. I was no more than half-listening, my mind running on its own track, and in my inattention I replied that I had no one back at home, that it would have been arrogant of me to have expected someone to wait. This is a partial truth at best, of course, since I have never had anyone of whom to ask such a thing, and I said it thinking only of myself, not of how Kowalski might take it. It occurs to me now that I was in essence calling _him_ arrogant. Again and again, this failure of empathy; it is hardly surprising that I should be alone in the first place.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 14 th October 1826_ **

Today we awoke to a blizzard, a complete white-out, and I thought it wise to stay where we were for the day. In truth it has been a welcome rest from the endless marching. Our meagre cooking fire went out overnight and I have not been able to find enough dry wood to light another, but the stones we heated last night and buried beneath our floor of balsam boughs have continued to give out sufficient heat to stave off hypothermia, provided that we stay in our bearskin, wrapped up in it like a jam roly-poly. There is a certain knack to it, though admittedly a certain unpleasantness too, for it has begun to reek of rancid fat; and the protection it gives is limited, as the heat seeps from holes made by warble fly larvae during the bear’s lifetime.

Still, we have spent an agreeable enough day curled up like littermates. It must truly have been cold overnight, for even the wolf was huddled up to us this morning, stealing our warmth.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

Shot a deer this morning. First meat for a while. Spent the day cooking and drying and smoking and pounding as much as we could carry. Pemmican, sort of, only we don’t have time to make it properly. The tongue we’ve eaten fresh-boiled. Funny, a year or two back I might’ve been squeamish about that. One thing I’m never going to be, though, and that’s a butcher. I went off to get the fire going instead. Fraser didn’t call me on it, he just dragged the skin up to the fire half an hour later with the joints piled on it, and tossed the liver and lights to Wolf. He had to wash his pants afterwards, as they were stiff with blood. Didn’t bother removing them, though. Just waded into the river and pounded at the cloth.

If you ever get us back, Stella, we’re not going to be fit to sit in a parlor with polite folks, all dressed up in their sprigged muslin. You know that, right?

If you get _me_ back, I mean. Not us.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 19 th October 1826_ **

It is bitterly cold again today. The snow of last week appears to have been no freak occurrence; the imminent approach of winter is undeniable, and we are yet to reach any signs of European settlement.

Each man setting off into this country makes his own bargain with it, signed as it were with a thorn dipped in his heart’s blood, aware that his life may be the price exacted. Kowalski knew this as well as anyone, and so I tell myself daily. Yet my Presbyterian heart speaks sternly against such Jesuitry, reminding me that anyone I have plucked from the waters becomes, in the harshest sense, my own: my burden, my responsibility, and not one I can discharge with the excuse that it was of his own free will that he followed me.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

Endless woods, woods and more woods. It’s like when you’re playing hide and go seek, that moment when all you can hear is your own breathing. Then the moment stretches out and out, and you realize you haven’t been found and you’re not going to be found – and maybe there’s no one even looking for you anymore.

Just tell me to shut up, Stella. Shut up and eat my pemmican. God knows it takes enough chewing…

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 20 th October 1826_ **

I no longer presume to guess what keeps Kowalski walking. Stubbornness, a yearning for the destination, a lack of alternative, sheer inertia?

For my own part, were I alone I might curl up under the fir roots and let the sharpening frost of morning take me, and think it no sin, there being no one to mourn my passing. All my life I have denied that my father did just that, somewhere out in the wilderness; I thought it cowardice, but now I know it to be none such.

But I am not alone. I walk because Kowalski walks, and because the weight of our packs is too much for one man. As long as he staggers to his feet each morning, so must I. He cannot be allowed to die out here.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

Guess what, pemmican for supper. Fraser’s keeping us on short commons with everything else, or, as he puts it, “husbanding the farinaceous foodstuffs.” You know what he’s like. (Except you don’t. I keep forgetting that.) Pemmican and hazelnuts every day – and I can almost hear you saying, “I thought you liked hazelnuts!”, and yes I do, but there’s such a thing as a surfeit, and if I die of it, you can put me up a gravestone inscribed “But we thought he liked them.”

Sorry, Stella, you know I talk nonsense when I’m this ~~damn~~ deuced tired. I lost my rag with Fraser yesterday, bawled at him like a fishwife, like it was all his fault we’d stopped for so long at that lake and made us late. Truth is, I’d never wanted to move again. I could’ve stayed there forever and not given a damn – only there was you, Stella, so I had to get going again, had to take that canoe as far as it could be taken and then shove the poor bastard back onto his torn and bleeding feet and damn well make him march, and make myself march, like it or not. So I yelled at him, and here we are, another day closer to you.

Marching’s good. The stomp-stomp-stomp of it jogs my brain inside my skull till it's shaken into mush, soft as sago pudding. With a pudding-brain, I don't have to think about anything. Can't think at all. No worrying about who I am or what I want or where I'm going, none of that. All I have to do is tread in the prints of the man ahead, who's just as exhausted as I am, and who doesn’t have the energy to be wondering about me either.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 21 st October 1826_ **

Kowalski is in a sunnier mood this evening, despite the snow. A day's marching seems to have cheered him considerably. Last night he lost his temper with me entirely; I thought I knew his darker humours, thought I had experienced the high-water mark of his anger, but I had never seen such concentrated rage in him. He was perfectly correct, too: our tardiness is more my fault than his. It was in a spirit of pure selfishness that I lingered at that lakeside, lulled by the Indian summer, delaying for the sake of wounds I could well have walked on sooner. Had we not been so conscious of the advancing months by the time we reached the rapids, we should never have attempted them, never lost the boat and been forced back into this slow painful creep.

He does have a tendency to grumble at small irritants, it is true, but he is for all that a quietly spoken man for the most part, and his fury was doubly startling in the silent woods as he told me what he should not have been forced to put into words: "I can't do this. Maybe you can, but I can't. I have to get back. You know that."

And I do know that. I should never have provoked him to such anger. He does not appear to be bearing a grudge, however, now that we are once again making progress towards civilisation, and I am grateful as ever for the openness of his disposition, for his lack of dissembling. There is no room on this expedition for two such as I.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

Stomp, stomp, stomp. Every step’s a step closer to you, and that’s a good thing. I guess it’s a good thing. Stomp, stomp, stomp.

Just ignore me, Stella. Lot of pages I’ll have to tear up before I send you any of these.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 22 nd October 1826_ **

I could not have known how early autumn would arrive this year, nor how harsh it would be. Nor could we have set out any earlier, for I left Montreal at ice-melt with the year’s first voyageurs and made the briskest journey north to Hudson’s Bay that might fairly have been made. Nor did I neglect to take all the advice that could be obtained about the climate in these parts, yet this is an earlier onset of snow than even the gloomiest of my advisors predicted.

No one could have foreseen this, no one. I tell myself this over and over, and I know that the fault remains my own.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

Too cold to write much. Can’t feel my fingers.

Fraser’s singing quietly to himself, with the Scots highlanders’ strange words and intervals. More and more now as he gets closer to home he sings in Gaelic rather than any tongue I can understand. Whether he means to exclude me or whether it’s just homesickness, I don’t know, but they’re not songs I can have any part in.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 23 rd October 1826_ **

No water, but we have gathered sufficient wood to melt snow and boil the last scraps of our pemmican, and cleared a place to sleep. Kowalski is curled up there already on a heap of fir branches. I have bid him goodnight, but he has pulled a fold of the blanket over his head and has not replied.

He and I are, I think, not far from breaking point.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

Wolf has gone. He was hanging around as usual two nights ago, and in the morning he was just gone. Sometimes he disappears and turns up a few hours later with a half-eaten bird or something, but not this time. Twenty miles later, no Wolf.

Fraser’s pretending not to care. I don’t know, maybe he really doesn’t. If you don’t let yourself get fond of something, if you don’t even give it a name, you can’t get hurt when it leaves, right?

He could probably track Wolf if he wanted to. Maybe he _is_ tracking him. Snow’s falling again, though. It’s hard to follow footprints underneath fresh snow.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 26 th October 1826_ **

The snow is a couple of feet deep now, with drifts up to four or five feet in places, and although its surface has developed a slight crust it is insufficient to hold a man’s weight. I have made snowshoes as best I can from roughly laminated ash saplings bound with rawhide, but neither of us is expert in their use and we stumble continually over our own feet as they tangle in the brushwood. Even when we succeed in staying upright, the crisping noise of our footsteps warns prey of our approach so that it is impossible to get near enough to shoot. Our sweat-dampened clothes freeze to our bodies and every few hundred yards our snowshoe laces slacken, being sodden through, and we must halt to re-tie them with fingers too numb to mind their duty.

I hardly know how to judge our mileage anymore, since for every step that we ascend we slide two back. I help Kowalski to his feet and he helps me as often to mine, but there may come a point where he will stay where he falls, and I with him, and I believe it will be a relief to us both.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

No food. We’ve made camp at the base of this hill. Can’t face trying to climb it right now. Got enough firewood here to stay warm, anyway.

*

 **_Fraser’s journal, undated._ ** _[Transcriber’s note: this entry is largely illegible]_

But..............................you know that............. I do not.................. Dad, you cannot just tell me to...........................

No, it is not at all........................ And he...................... You know it is not that simple.

Just leave me alone!

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

Shot a squirrel. Boiled and ate it, cooking liquor and all.

Had to half-carry Fraser today. Trying to head south, but there’s no sun to follow. I don’t think he cared. Don’t think he even noticed. He’s talking to himself again, too. Nonsense, far as I can work out. Keeps telling me sorry and then telling his father sorry, like his father’s actually there, listening.

I don’t know what to do. I guess you’d tell me to pray, and I _am_ praying. For him, for me. God help us both.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

No food. I guess we’ll stay here. No point waking Fraser and staggering another half-mile. We’d only have to dig out a new sleeping hole and get another fire going. No point. We’re done. And I’m not scared, not as long as he’s with me.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

DON’T READ THESE, STELLA. If no one finds us, or if they find us too late, don’t read these letters. I don’t have the energy to go back through them, but I probably said things I shouldn’t have said, so don’t read them.

And if you do, remember I tried my best. I really did. That’s all I’ve got. I’m sorry.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 2 nd November 1826_ **

This, they tell me, is the correct date, although it would mean whole days unaccounted for in my memory. All I know for certain is that I am warm and well-fed and dazed with our good fortune, not just that we should have found this place but that the people here should have taken us in and been so hospitable to two such sorry-looking strangers.

The wolf, having reappeared, urgent with barking, led us at first only to a broken-down old barn with a floor of churned mud, but its presence signified that a homestead could not be far away, and it possessed a loft deep with hay in which we could bury ourselves and wait for the blizzard to blow itself out. I awoke disoriented some time later, I cannot tell how much, to find a small girl in a sackcloth smock standing over me with a shotgun, yelling for her papa. The wolf, being no fool, had retreated well out of range, and Kowalski was still fast asleep amongst the hay, dead to the world in spite of the child’s howls. The farmer, M. Thibodeau, when he appeared, was not particularly disposed to be lenient to vagabonds trespassing on his property, and if Kowalski had not by some chance reminded the good Mme. Thibodeau of a long-lost son of hers, drowned years ago from a lumber raft on one of the Great Lakes, all might yet have gone badly with us. But no, “mon pauvre petit ange” he is, and she has taken us into her home and cosseted us accordingly.

M. Thibodeau, reassured partly by the local priest’s recollection of my father’s name and more especially by a guinea or two dredged from the depths of my pack, tells me that his two surviving sons are expected to pass Trois-Rivières, the nearest town to this present hamlet, within the next few days, and that Kowalski and I would be welcome to take passage with them and their lumber-convoy down the St. Lawrence as far as the town of Québec; and such is my current intention. Kowalski’s feet I think will heal with time and rest, and rest he should now be able to have, for M. Thibodeau has agreed to take us in his cart to Trois-Rivières, and from Québec onwards we can continue by ship or post-carriage as far as need be.

Meanwhile Mme. Thibodeau has helped me treat and dress Kowalski’s wounds, has fed him three slices of pie and looked the other way whilst he slipped a fourth piece to the wolf, and is now regarding him with maternal affection as he dozes on a straw-filled sack in front of the fire. It is perhaps fortunate that neither can understand a word of the other’s language, yet it is true that in sleep he is not entirely unangelic: a ragged, disreputable angel of sorts, with pastry crumbs in his beard, and his fingers buried in the wolf’s ruff.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 8 th November 1826_ **

If the stagecoach via Petit-Sault has little else to recommend it, it does not at least require one to take to one’s feet very often, except for when the road is so steep and so mired in mud and melted snow that the wretched horses cannot haul the carriage up the incline. Kowalski insists on walking these sections with me and the post-boys, despite my objections and despite the fresh blood that will keep oozing through his bandages. The wounds are slowly knitting, however, and should be scabbed over by the time we reach Halifax.

It would of course have been quicker for him to have travelled directly to Boston, but the notion does not appear to have occurred to him, and I have not been honourable enough to suggest it, as in my selfishness I wish to retain his presence as long as I may. If the roads remain open and the stage does not break down or lose a wheel, we may be home in as little as a week, and he can take ship from there easily enough.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

I’m fine, don’t worry. I’m on the post-road to Halifax. Fraser’s fine, too. Seems to be, anyway. Not talking to ghosts anymore. I don’t think he knows how sick he was, and I’m not about to tell him.

We’re traveling kind of out of my way, I guess. I could’ve gone straight home overland, but I don’t have the ready money and didn’t like to ask Fraser for any, not when he’s done so much for me already. But in Halifax I can get a draft on one of the banks to pay my passage home by sea, and it’ll be convenient for sending a batch of specimens direct to England. Samuel Stevens on Bedford-street in London can get me a better price for them than anyone in Boston or Philadelphia could’ve, what with the exoticism of the New World and all. That’s something to be considered.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 13 th November 1826_ **

We should be back in my home town within a day or two, an idea still difficult to comprehend. I am aware that I ought to have asked Kowalski outright whether he would mind accompanying me there; the disingenuousness of my conduct is abhorrent even to me. But the very idea of openness seems too much, as if I were being flayed, all the layers of my bark peeled back and my heartwood exposed; it feels like a thing one cannot or should not permit. A ring-barked tree, its protective wrappings cankered or ripped or gnawed to the quick around the full circumference of its trunk, must surely wither and die; it cannot live. And yet I know it can be sustained by the narrowest shred of rind, the slenderest link from root to stem. One does not need to live enshrouded.

So I tell myself, but outwardly I say nothing. Is it not after all for Kowalski to protest, if he does not like my conduct?

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 15 th November 1826_ **

Halifax, as strange and familiar and noisy and squalid as ever. We have halted at the Crown and Anchor to eat and rest whilst I send to Mrs. Lennox to have the house prepared, the rooms aired, the fires laid.

There are no English men-of-war currently in harbour, so Kowalski can feel safe from the draft; not that any pressgang is likely to take up a companion of mine, of course. This is my native town, or at least the closest thing I have to one, yet he seems more at home here than I as he calls out to the sailors on the hard in their own argot and exchanges fluent insults with them. I might perhaps add a codicil to my notions of beauty: a man at ease in his own world.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

I knew Fraser’s family was rich, but I hadn’t realized _how_ rich. He’s got this whole big house to himself, a mile distant from the stink of the harbor, with a study full of specimens, and a glasshouse, and a library. A _library_ , Stella, a whole room just for books. Plus there’s a housekeeper and a maid to cook the meals and lay out his clothes for him.

He does eat porridge for breakfast, though. (Even if it’s porridge made with milk and syrup, which he eats looking guiltily over his shoulder in case his grandmother’s ghost is watching.) And he sends both servants home afterwards and prepares his own suppers. I don’t feel so out of place when they’re gone.

Then there’s feather beds with fresh bed-linen, bleached bone-white and warmed with a copper warming pan instead of a stone hot-pig. I don’t sleep too good, though. Maybe I’m just not tired enough anymore.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 20 th November 1826_ **

I have had Mrs. Lennox give Kowalski the guest room at the end of the landing. I supposed he might appreciate the luxury; I forgot that he was unaccustomed to being alone, that he was used to sharing a chamber with his brother. I find I spend much of my own nights staring into the fire here in my study until I can almost imagine him sitting the other side of it, examining some beetle or other and pencilling notes into his journal.

By day we have been busy sorting and classifying our collections and laying the pressed plant specimens in new paper. An account must be drawn up whilst the characteristics and observations are still fresh in my memory, and then there is the necessary cross-checking of my volumes of American flora so that all the applicable synonyms may be listed. The shipment of bulbs and roots from my Great Lakes journey and those from Hudson’s Bay arrived some time since and are in hand: the duplicates stand ready in jars of dry sand, along with the fructifications in charcoal, and I have ordered boxes for their transportation to Dr. Hooker in Glasgow; he may then send whatever he pleases to Kew or to Mr. Sabine of the Horticultural Society for their garden at Kensington, or perhaps to the Chelsea Physic Garden, and I hope some at least of them may keep and vegetate.

So much work to do, and I can barely find time for half of it. Then there is the account that must be written up for the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and the engravings to be ordered, the copies of which will need hand-tinting. I was wondering whether I might persuade Kowalski to stay for a while by offering him a salary to help arrange the hortus siccus and prepare the drawings for the engravers, but I would not wish to place him in the condition of a paid subordinate, which must be galling to a spirit such as his.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

I checked with the post office today: no letter from you. Not that I expected one. There’s no way you could’ve known I’d be here.

I should write you. I will write you, just as soon I have a ship arranged.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 21 st November 1826_ **

I have had the barber come and cut our hair, with the remnants scrubbed with lye soap in baths of near-scalding water. Mrs. Lennox was hardly inclined to trust me to cleanse my own scalp, and Kowalski looked genuinely alarmed lest she offer to oversee his own ablutions. This however she did not have the nerve to do, and we were permitted to wash and dress ourselves like the responsible adults she does not believe us to be.

I remember how, in one autumn of my boyhood, one of my grandmother’s ducks raised a brood too late in the season; how I took the hatching eggs into the glassed-in porch for warmth and watched the chicks crawling bedraggled from their shells and drying into balls of yellow fluff. Kowalski is sitting in the same porch now, cross-legged in the sunshine and quite as fluffy as the ducklings ever were. I did not realise, in all those months of dirt and smoke and grease, just how fair he was.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

You’d hardly recognize us now, our vagabond beards gone, our hair cropped, our clothes so fine your father’s richest friends would covet them.

Fraser let his housekeeper Mrs. Lennox take away our old garments and cast them into a bonfire in the back yard – she was his old nurse and still treats him like a child – and as I’ve no ready money for new ones, he’s lent me some of his own shirts and breeches. Too big for me, of course. Too big for him, too. He’s still thinner than he ought to be. We spent all that time dreaming up more and more elaborate feasts, crazier and crazier lists of food, but now that we’re here all we really want is bread and cheese.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 22 nd November 1826_ **

I have not spoken to Kowalski, and I shall not. I shall not ask him to stay. I know, in any case, that he could not. But I am uneasily aware that the friend with whom I always dreamt I might share my studies, the ghostly companion to this empty life of mine, has assumed a new configuration in my mind. The set of his shoulders, the curve of his jaw, the light in his eyes as he turns to me: these forms that were once so fluid and uncertain have become fixed in one shape, one so familiar and dear to me now that I cannot unsee it.

I am cold as I lie here in the cot in my study, with a deep bone-aching cold that can be cured by no bath nor fire, by nothing save to hold him again; and I know full well the extent to which my sin would have him fall.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

I’d been sort of hoping Fraser would suggest me staying a while, maybe as an assistant or clerk, doing the note-taking and drawing the specimens. Don’t frown at me, Stella, he could afford my keep easily enough, and I could come back to Boston in the spring. There’s so many species to catalog, and he has a better library here than I’d ever get entry to in Boston.

And he does need the help. You’d think he’d have plenty of time to write his own notes, but here’s what he didn’t tell me: he’s given up his medical practice, his proper, fee-paying practice, true, but that doesn’t mean he’s not out half the time attending to people who can’t pay. Anyone who can’t afford the town physician’s fees – all the old, the poor, the broken-down, those who can’t even afford the apothecary’s charges – they all come and they wait in the shadows outside our kitchen door, and they ask Mrs. Lennox whether “young Dr. Fraser” is at home. Sometimes when I’m out in the town, buying paper or ink at the stationer’s, they come up to me instead, touching their foreheads and asking me to talk to him on their behalf. Once it was this old woman, very old and ragged, who begged me to get “young Master Ben” to save her granddaughter, long gone in childbirth. It was the first time I’d ever heard his given name.

I’ll stay a little while longer, just to get things packed. The last ship to Boston before winter won’t sail for a week or two yet.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 23 rd November 1826_ **

Out again all day and night on calls. Kowalski has been employed on the classification and the drawing of specimens and seems contented enough. Mrs. Lennox tells me that when she went down to the harbour to buy fish she met him walking there with the wolf, and that the dinner she had left keeping warm on the range has been eaten by one or both of them; this she reports to me as if man and wolf were equally my charges, in whose welfare I must necessarily be interested, and I suppose she is not mistaken.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

Spilled ink on the Turkey carpet again. I’ve tried to scrub it out, but…

Mrs. Lennox came and gave me that look, the one you used to give me sometimes. You know, not scolding, just sort of disappointed, like you’d thought I was something better than I am. It’s stupid to have carpets in a study anyway. Floorboards, those I could’ve just sanded clean.

Fraser says she likes me well enough, though. Says he can tell because she speaks English to me, and that if she really didn’t approve she’d pretend she only had the Gaelic.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 24 th November 1826_ **

Today I suggested in all seriousness that Kowalski should write an account of our travels, one such as the narrative Captain Franklin published of his expedition to the Coppermine River a couple of years since, volumes of which are changing hands now for several guineas.

I have no doubt of Kowalski’s abilities, but I offered to assume the role of co-author if he wished it, or at least bear the initial costs of publication. This I said clumsily, as with everything concerning finance, but he replied only that he would be in funds once his West Coast specimens were sold, and that our expedition, unlike Capt. Franklin’s efforts, was not to truly unknown lands, only to those emptied of their former inhabitants.

I am sorry to have provoked him to impatience. There are topics I am better not to broach with him at all, and money is clearly one of them, however hard it is to watch him struggle with burdens that could so easily be lightened.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 26 th November 1826_ **

I am, after a great deal of hesitation, considering sailing with the _Boreas_ on its voyage next year to seek an open, temperate polar sea north of the frozen channels of Baffin’s Bay. There would be an excellent chance of discovering new species (with a dredge and tow-nets, if landing were not possible) and certainly of finding new lands. The season for arctic navigation being narrow, Captain Dupre intends to set out in time to reach the pack ice in Melville Bay by May or June and to take provisions for eighteen months or more, in case of being frozen in, and with his good will I might join the expedition as surgeon or perhaps as official naturalist.

I mentioned this to Kowalski this morning, not that I suppose him particularly interested in my plans, but in case he should write to me here during that period and wonder at not receiving an answer. He was at the time crouched over his crates, packing the last of his specimens to send to England, and he nodded without so much as looking up. He has but to ask me to stay and I would stay, but I think it better to leave than to remain here alone.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 27 th November 1826_ **

A midshipman from the American schooner _Nimrod_ called at the house today, bringing a letter directed only to “Mr. Fraser, of Halifax”. He apologised civilly to me for the lateness of its delivery, the _Nimrod_ having been in port a few days already, but he had been obliged to make various enquiries to find the right person.

The letter I found to be from a Mr. Charles Kowalski, asking after his brother’s whereabouts. The last that had been heard of him was a note sent via the _William and Ann_ stating that he was planning to leave Hudson’s Bay in company with a Mr. Fraser of Halifax, and since he never arrived in Boston, his brother made so bold as to apply to me for further information.

The letter enclosed another missive, this one directed to Kowalski – my Kowalski – in a female hand, presumably that of Miss DuBois. It seems somewhat remiss of him not to have sent her his direction sooner; perhaps he did so but it went astray. I have not said so to him, of course. I merely passed both letters on without further remark.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

I’m putting off answering your letter, and I’m writing instead to my imaginary version of you, the one who doesn’t judge and doesn’t condemn, who watches Fraser eating with that stupid scrimshaw spoon and knows I’m watching him too.

He’s such an honorable man, Stella. Such a kind and gentle and honorable man, who lets me as close to him as honor allows and releases me with pain in his eyes for what he can’t give and I can’t ask of him. He --- I don’t know. I think about him, and it’s like I should be writing verses or something, only I don’t know how. Laugh at me all you want, Stella. I don’t know how to do any of this.

I have to leave, whether you want to see me in Boston or not. I’ve arranged passage back on the _Nimrod_ , and I’ll be there before Christmas. My brother will take me in, even if no one else will.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 28 th November 1826_ **

I have appetites unknown to me before, a force of desire previously unimaginable: not merely to hold him and keep him and possess him, but—

I look at him sitting here bent over his papers in the low winter sunshine, at the arch of his neck with its soft down backlit along the nape, at the lines of his shoulders shifting under his too-large shirt as he stretches towards the inkwell, and I want to reach for him, to taste the salt on his skin, to feel the strength in him as he kicks out or yields...

I begin to understand as never before why men risk shame and ostracism and flogging and hanging for this. And I understand that I must let him go. One cannot ask a man to besmirch his own nature. I did not bring him back here safe for that.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 29 th November 1826_ **

Last night I dreamt uneasily of the campfire, and when I awoke I found it no dream. Kowalski was there, real and shivering, crouched on the hearthrug in his nightshirt and muttering something about being unable to sleep. I believe I must have mentioned the sleeping roll, for he gave a pained, twisted smile and said, “Don’t speak of that rancid bearskin ever again, ever, ever. I can smell it yet.”

The “ever, ever” in which we must not speak of it must be a few days at most. It cannot be more, for the _Nimrod_ sails as soon as her stores are aboard.

I shall have Mrs. Lennox move another cot into my study, that Kowalski need not lie alone.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

That’s the last of my belongings packed up. Fraser will have to keep himself company the next four months or so, then he’ll be off on his own travels. I don’t know what else to say --- to him, to you, to anyone.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 30 th November 1826_ **

Mrs. Lennox has been busy putting up pork pies and fruitcake for Kowalski to take on his journey to Boston, as she does not trust “that Yankee crew” to feed him properly.

Tomorrow I lose him in any case, and therefore I should speak, but I cannot. There is nothing to say.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

I’m angry with you, Stella, I admit I am. Not for your letter, not for its contents, but because it should make a difference and it doesn’t. It doesn’t change anything.

I all but asked Fraser – I went to his study late one night, and all he did was promise to move a second bed in there for me. Now there’s twin cots, one each side of that spartan room of his, with the fireplace marking the line of division. It’s like summer again, the two of us sitting either side of the campfire, like there’s no need to share warmth. Only, it’s not summer anymore.

And here’s the worst thing: he still pats my shoulder sort of kindly, sort of reassuringly, but there’s a hesitation to it that wasn’t there before, like I disgust him but he’s determined not to let it show. His kindness appalls me. That I’m forcing him into such kindness appalls me.

I should’ve stayed in my own cold room. I should never have come here. I should never have followed him from Hudson’s Bay.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 1 st December 1826_ **

A long tale to tell, and finally time to tell it.

Kowalski left earlier today. I spent the forenoon in making further preparations for my trip north, and the wolf spent it pointedly ignoring me. I was tempted to go down to the docks to see Kowalski off, but I avoided the temptation, for I knew it would end in my begging him to stay, and I could not say which I was more afraid of: his refusal or his unwilling acquiescence.

I was about to give in, however (telling myself that it could not be unreasonable to watch the ship from the quayside, once he was safely aboard) when Mrs. Lennox, in bringing me soup for luncheon, placed my usual spoon on the table, calling it “the one made by Mr. Kowalski, poor soul”. When I asked why she described him so, she said she had enquired of him about his letter and found he had been “thrown over by his young lady”, as she put it, who, not having heard from him in some time, had consented instead to marry a wealthy lawyer these several months ago.

“Such a handsome young gentleman, I don’t suppose he’ll be melancholy for long,” she said.

I wondered that she had dared be so inquisitive. I wondered, too, that he had said nothing to me of Miss DuBois’ letter. At breakfast he had looked a little chagrined, perhaps, but had not appeared broken-hearted. Determined, maybe, and set in his purpose; but then how could I judge another man’s feelings? A wretched friend I had been to him, so wrapped up in my own misery that I paid no attention to his.

No ship ever weighs anchor smart to her time; always there is a hitch whilst the last few barrels are hauled aboard or the tide turns or her captain invokes some such nautical delay or other. The _Nimrod_ might be in port for hours if not days yet; surely wind or water would be against her?

Down the harbour road I ran, down the wet cobbled streets to the docks, to find the _Nimrod_ long since under sail, a dark smudge halfway to the horizon, gulls whirling in her wake. I stared and stared as if I might still somehow see Kowalski on deck; even though I knew it to be impossible, I could not help but search with watering eyes for that dear familiar figure I would recognise at any distance. But he was gone from me, and though I might yet send letters after him, there was nothing I could ever hope to make him understand via the sterile crabbed medium of ink.

“Oi, sir! Sir!” It was the blackguard little potboy from the Crown and Anchor, yelling after me. “D’ye want yon dunnage fetching? Only, if it’s your house you want it fetching to, sir, it’ll need the gig ordering.”

“What dunnage?” I said.

The boy pointed to the far end of the wharf. “His, sir. Your friend’s.”

Shading my eyes against the storm-flecks on the water, I saw a lone figure, seated on a sea chest and shrouded in a boat cloak, looking out to sea. I was halfway down the dock towards him before I remembered the Crown’s boy.

“Wait there, child,” I called over my shoulder. “Just wait for me there.”

Kowalski did not move as I approached. He was looking out at the distant _Nimrod_ as it receded through the churning waves, and when I stepped between him and the quayside he flinched and half-raised his hand in an abortive gesture I could not interpret. I glanced down the breakwater towards the waiting boy, and then reached out and touched Kowalski’s shoulder very gently, as one might wake a sleeper.

“Will you come up to the house, now?” I asked.

He blinked as if dazed, as if I had truly woken him, as if he had had no other plan than to sit there forever, frozen in the wind and salt spray.

“Or come to the Crown, at least,” I said, “and they will send your dunnage after.”

He sat in silence another minute, his arms folded almost mutinously, although what he was battling – whether his own wishes or mine – I could not tell. Then he jumped to his feet and stalked down the quay towards the hill road. He had, in the end, nowhere else to go, and he must have known I would house him and feed him and clothe him without question, as surely as he would have done as much for me, had our positions been reversed.

It was a long journey back to the house, and the wind did not let up for a moment, rising, if anything, until it reached a furious shriek, heavy with gust-flung sleet. I was glad of my greatcoat but would have been gladder still to have offered it to Kowalski, had I thought he would accept it, for he had begun to shiver in spite of his boat cloak.

At length we gained the shelter of the house, but he seemed no more inclined to talk than before, so I left him by the fire and went to stoke up the range for tea. He accepted his cup without a word, and I took my usual place opposite him, not knowing what else to do and afraid that I might provoke him into lashing out or leaving for God knew where. When at last he spoke, he did so without looking up, and so quietly that I could barely make out the words.

“Take me,” he said.

Just that, and for a moment my heart beat strangely, as if it were possible he might have seen into my wilder thoughts. Then he nodded towards my sea chest, the one I had been packing for the journey to the Arctic, and his words resolved themselves into sense: a request, startling enough in its way, that he might join me on the expedition.

“I know the life,” he said, mistaking, I suppose, my silence for refusal. “I could sail as a foremast hand, if nothing else. Captain Dupre would enrol me if you asked him.”

I began to stammer, to protest that he was full as well qualified to sign up as naturalist as I was, but he shook his head at this, impatient.

“No? Then you might request to be expedition artist, or perhaps surgeon’s mate, or—” I said, floundering, knowing the words were wrong even as they came out. I would have been glad merely to have known him safe, even if my covetous soul did wish him as my own cabin-mate, with the luxury of keeping him by me day and night.

He got up abruptly and paced towards the door, and I thought then that I had lost him altogether. He paused at my side, however, and laid a hand on my shoulder, silencing me. I could feel the pressure of his fingers even through my greatcoat, gripping my arm as if that closeness was as much a comfort to him as it was to me, as indeed I believe it had often been during our travels together. And, there being nothing else I could do for him, I sat still and silent and let him glean what solace he might from the simple proximity of one who had never wished anything but his happiness.

Then he raised his head – it was the first time in several days that he had met my eyes, and his own were winter-dark – and he said again, “Take me,” in that defiant way of his, a way that has nothing of plea and all of challenge.

And I knew then that he meant it; that he meant everything I had in my heart, everything I had wanted for so long; that I might take him and he would take me. I held him to me, as tightly as ever I held him in bearskin dreams, and he did not try to pull away, as in my nightmares he always had. He bent over me and buried his face against my neck, and he was not cold, after all, but burning hot, his breath fierce on my skin.

And if this is a sin, as all say it is, I care not. I cannot think it so. If I am dragging him to a place from which there is no return, he goes willingly. In everything he is willing. A thousand miles he has followed me across this vast unknown continent, trusting me in every step. Now I am lost, but he is not. He takes my hand, and he shows me the way.

*

**_Letter from S.R.K. to Miss DuBois, undated._ **

I have to go write you a real letter now, Stella, a formal letter, acknowledging your note and saying the proper thing. “I beg you to consider yourself free from any blame in the matter” – that about the right wording? I said you shouldn’t wait for me, and even if I hadn’t said it, you’re not to blame. I’m glad you got to go to Litchfield Academy for a while, in spite of your father’s disapproval, and that you’ve found a man who’ll treat you right. You needed a path of your own, I know that. You needed a way out.

Maybe you should sue me for breach of promise. That’d clear your reputation, let the gossips know it was my fault, not yours. Promise me you’ll think about it? I’ll write my brother and tell him to use the proceeds of my collections to pay off the suit, if you bring one.

I don’t think I’ll ever be back. Not to Boston, at any rate. The _Boreas_ sails in the spring, soon as the weather allows. Fraser thinks there’s nothing to the north but ice and snow, that there’s no northwest passage. All the natives he’s ever asked have said the Esquimaux don’t tell of any such thing. So maybe we’ll go up there, find it’s not there, find whatever _is_ there. But wherever we go, it’ll be an adventure, and we’ll go together.

I guess these letters will never be torn out, never sent. I guess I’ve known that a long while now. I liked writing to you, though, my silent friend who’s listened so patiently all this time, not judging me, just listening.

And as for the real you – the demure lady in sprigged muslin that you’ve become, and the wild girl in red ribbons I know you still are in your heart – I hope you too have found the one man you’d follow without hesitation to the ends of the earth.

God bless you and keep you safe,

S.R.K.

*

**_Fraser’s journal, 2 nd December 1826_ **

Beauty is love, and love is beauty, and all other considerations on the subject are for naught. I thought my companion homely at one time. The bird finding its mate by his song, does it see him as drab, plain? The beetle, does it turn back for want of iridescence?

He lies tangled now in the sheets, the most beautiful part of God’s creation, golden in the firelight. He is stirring, pulling at my foot for attention. I must go, I must go. He laughs to see me with my journal; he asks what I am writing about, whether I have written of him, whether I have told the truth.

And I think, in the end, that I have.

**B. Fraser, 1826.**

* * *

 

_End of source material. The fate of the authors is not known._

_Transcribed and catalogued by F. Argentea 2016-08-29._

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

>  **Songs quoted:**  
>  _“Unhook the West Port and let us gae free”_ – from [Bonnie Dundee](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nu7zI8QP0uA) (published 1820s by Walter Scott, based on older songs).  
>  _“Now the Chesapeake so bold sailed from Boston we’ve been told”_ – from [The Shannon and the Chesapeake](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtgyKLwaDWA) (1813 ballad).  
>  _“What care we for wind or weather?”_ – from [the Mingulay Boat Song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpMq6V3XCzQ) (published 1930s by Hugh Roberton, based on a traditional Gaelic song).  
>  _“The first men through this way”_ – from [Northwest Passage](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVY8LoM47xI) (Stan Rogers, modern).

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The First Men Through This Way (Fanart)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8186497) by [look_turtles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/look_turtles/pseuds/look_turtles)




End file.
